Poor Alberto had to wear the pom-pons

In a NY Mag interview which all but calls her a musty throwback, Jhumpa Lahiri argues that it’s not that she provides no surprises in writing a hermetically-sealed world between Kendall Square and Brookline, it’s that reviewers are racist, man, racist:

Unaccustomed Earth is, once again, about upwardly mobile South Asians from New England, and so is the novel she’s working on. “‘Is that all you’ve got in there?’ I get asked the question all the time,” says Lahiri. “It baffles me. Does John Updike get asked this question? Does Alice Munro? It’s the ethnic thing, that’s what it is. And my answer is always, yes, I will continue to write about this world, because it inspires me to write, and there’s nothing more important than that.” [Link]

Her style is back-to-basics:

… if you’re looking for something radically new, look elsewhere. “I’m the least experimental writer,” she says. “The idea of trying things just for the sake of pushing the envelope, that’s never really interested me…”

Stylistically, she doesn’t have a hook: no genre bending, no comics-inflected supernaturalism, no world-historical ventriloquism, no 9/11 flip books. Just couples and families joining, coming apart, dealing with immigration, death, and estrangement… Surrounded by acolytes of Rushdie or DeLillo, she’s a traditionalist…. [Link]

Lahiri’s even timid about dating her book by referring to the tsunami:

‘I think that the fact there is a major global event in this book–I don’t know if it was okay or not…’ [Link]

She writes and lives in reverse, a literary Dorian Gray:

… Lahiri’s work has tended to anticipate the milestones in her life. Mixed marriages, parenthood, ailing parents–she wrote about all of these before she had any firsthand knowledge of them. It’s partly what made her seem so precocious, though she wasn’t published until her thirties. [Link]

The new book, Unaccustomed Earth, is more fleshed out than The Interpreter of Maladies:

… eight mature stories each stretching almost to novella length…

… [Her success has] enabled her to write longer short stories, a form that happens to suit her perfectly. “I could keep them on the back burner, at a low simmer, for a longer time,”… The new stories have an expansiveness that Interpreter’s snapshots lacked, but also a cohesion that The Namesake could have used. “I just feel like maybe there’s a little more meat on the bones…” [Link]

Her editor is in love with her work, and the publisher gave her a two-book deal which commenters peg at between $2-4M. If the 800K figure is accurate, that makes The Namesake a monster success by lit fic standards. Rushdie’s last supposedly sold around 50K:

Desser admits to breaking down in the office while going over Unaccustomed Earth–sometimes on the third read. [Link]

… [she] ended up selling 800K copies of The Namesake…

Ms. Lahiri got $4 million for two books [her next is a novel] at Knopf. The Namesake was published by another publisher, of which the $4 million advance does not apply. [Commenters]

It’s interesting — Lahiri’s style is detached, a bit chilly, which is just what I complain about in Hollywood movies vs. Indian ones. In that sense her analyticalness is a good match to the U.S. market. But she’s not PoMo ironic:

… for all the polish, it’s the lack of ironic layering that tends to distance us from the tragedies chronicled in most “literary” fiction. Lahiri isn’t afraid to make people cry… Lahiri writes often of illnesses, failing marriages, and just plain loneliness, but thanks to her economy and mastery of detail, it never quite crosses over into the sentimental. Nor does it rely on the melodramatic twists that are staples of more middlebrow writers like Sue Monk Kidd or Alice Sebold. [Link]

Perhaps her slow, workmanlike accumulation of detail manages to import the sentimentality of emo Bengal without tripping Brooklynites’ sap detectors.