Well Brouight-up Indian Girls and the Weight of the World: Lahiri and Badami Compared

Jhumpa Lahiri's short story collection Unaccustomed Earth kept me up reading late recently, and this despite the fact that I'd read four of the eight stories previously in The New Yorker. The book continues to explore a circle of character types she has written about before: upper middle-class, educated Indians and their children living in the United States. Full of carefully-observed detail, the stories present the dramas that resonate with those of many of the people who read The New Yorker. Children succeed or fail disastrously, parents die, love comes or does not: there must be tens of thousands of intelligent readers who can sympathize with Lahiri's people.

Politics, societal conflict, even professional and intellectual struggles are largely absent from this world, and as I read I found myself comparing the stories with Anita Rau Badami's three novels, particularly  Can You Hear the Night Bird Call? Badami was born and educated in India, unlike Lahiri who is North-American born, but many of her characters come from the same world as Lahiri's. Her people also sometimes feel caught between two worlds, and they try to make good lives for themselves, too.

A major--and telling difference--is the way the Badami wants to understand how her characters fit into a world much larger than the one of intimate relationships which Lahiri almost always favours. Night Bird is the best example of this, because its three women characters are caught up in Hindu-Sikh conflicts that permeate a good part of Indian politics, and spill over tragically into North America. At the heart--and the end--of the novel is the Air India disaster, which until 9/11 had the unhappy distinction of being the world's most fatal civilian terrorist attack.

Outside events only intrude into Lahiri's stories once: Unaccustomed Earth contains a reference to the 2004 tsunami. It seems Lahiri is a little uncomfortable about that even. “The real event just sort of caught my character in there,” she told one interviewer. “I don’t tackle major global events. I don’t like to read about something—an event, a cataclysm—in fiction for the sake of reading it." Better to turn to non-fiction for accounts of events, she said: "that’s what good nonfiction is for. And I think that the fact there is a major global event in (my) book—I don’t know if it was okay or not.”"
I would say it most definitely is okay. In fact, the reference is masterfully set in context, and opens up Lahiri's fictional world so that it resonates far beyond the lives of her well-brought up characters. In the future, I hope she continues to tell us stories about how the people she imagines fit into a world wider than one of good schools, deadly but well-managed illness and love which sometimes is arranged and sometimes is not.

Photo: Jhumpa Lahiri, top; Anita Rau Badami, bottom.

Young Men and Fire: Recent and Past

Nineteen young firefighters were burned to death over the weekend in Arizona, and this morning we smell smoke from forest fires 900 kilometers from Montreal  near James Bay in Northern Quebec.  Both disquieting, an evidence again of the uneasy relation between fire and humans.

Norman Maclean, William Rainey Harper Professor of English at the University of Chicago and author of one of the best novels ever about Montana and the West, was marked by another forest fire disaster.

In 1949 when Maclean was in his early mid 40s, a crew of 15 elite Smokejumpers were trapped in  an immense conflagration in Montana just hours after their jump.  Only three survived, and for years afterwards Maclean was haunted by both the fire and what the young men must have gone through.  His account, Young Men and Fire: A True Story of the Mann Gulch Fire, was published two years after his death in 1990.  Long awaited, it won  the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1992.

As an example of how to integrate research into  creative non-fiction it has few peers.  Maclean ferreted out the details of the young men's lives and placed them in context of the period.  He also attempted to view their experience in the larger framework of our mortality.  "It had been said since tragedy was first analyzed that it is governed by the emotions of fear and pity.  As the Smokejumpers went up the hill...it was like a great jump backwards into the sky--they were suddenly and totally without command and suddenly without structure and suddenly free to disintegrate and free finally to be afraid...

"Beyond the world of sight and soon even beyond fear, the nonhuman elements of heat and toxic gasses were becoming the only two elements, and soon heat was even burning out  fear..."

For anyone, old or young, who wonders about fire, the book is worth reading.  But for those who would like to read Maclean at his height, I can't recommend too highly A River Runs through It and Other Stories.   And the movie with Brad Pitt, directed by Robert Redford, isn't too bad.

Joyce Carol Oates on Writing

The New Yorker has started posting videos of its interviews with writers. Here's an interesting one with one of the world's most prolific writers.

 Joyce Carol Oates says that nothing is as interesting as her creations, and that she has no personality--"except my husband thinks that I do."

Very interesting. 

Thanks to Mary Evora for the link, BTW.