'Unaccustomed Earth' by Jhumpa Lahiri

Jhumpa Lahiri

Alfred A. Knopf: 334 pp., $25

WITH her Pulitzer Prize- winning story collection "Interpreter of Maladies" and her novel "The Namesake," Jhumpa Lahiri established herself as a clear-eyed and compassionate chronicler of the lives of expatriate Bengalis and their first-generation American-born children. In her latest work, "Unaccustomed Earth," a powerful collection of short stories, those children have left home and are starting families of their own, as they struggle both with tangled filial relationships and the demands of parenthood. The straddling of two cultures has been replaced by the straddling of two generations.

In the story that gives the collection its title, an aging widower experiences quiet exhilaration at being free of the demands of family. Only one suitcase to check at the airport when he goes on his overseas package tours, no lawn to mow or screens to replace now that he's given up the house. And he has a traveling companion: "A girlfriend? The word was unknown to him, impossible to express." He is as guilt-ridden about his contentment as Ruma, his daughter, is about not inviting him to move in with her family; in India, there would have been no question about it.

On a weeklong visit from his Pennsylvania condominium to her new home in Seattle, her father forms a close relationship with her son -- that and his compliments on her cooking break down Ruma's defenses. Still mourning the death of her mother, and adrift in her new life, she aches for familial connection. She needs him, but when she tearfully suggests that he move in with her family, he declines: "He did not want to be part of another family, part of the mess, the feuds, the demands, the energy of it."

As in all her fiction, Lahiri's prose here is deceptively simple, its mechanics invisible, as she enters into her characters' innermost journeys. The moment-to-moment rendering of Ruma's vulnerability and her father's rising panic at all that he's keeping secret sweeps the reader into a compelling emotional landscape.

Looking back on his marriage, Ruma's father decides that "the entire enterprise of having a family, of putting children on this earth, as gratifying as it sometimes felt, was flawed from the start." In "A Choice of Accommodations," Amit and Megan are eight years into that flawed enterprise. During a weekend visit to his old prep school to attend a friend's wedding, Amit comes face-to-face with his anxiety and unhappiness.