Jhumpa Lahiri and Style in "Interpreter of Maladies"

Jhumpa Lahiri’s book, Interpreter of Maladies, is a compilation of short stories handling a myriad of topics ranging from the tragedy of loss to unrequited love. Her stories are universal in humanity but deal specifically with the experiences of Indians and the unique perspective they hold in dealing with such issues and political events undergone in their country and culture. In fairness, though, there are moments in the collection where I feel the ethnic characterization is often ambiguous aside from the physicality. This may be the justice of her work and description, though. Her style is heralded, though, as an authentic voice of modernism and is consistent throughout her works as something unique, even though at times it feels a bit heavy-handed.

               The writing style developed throughout the stories is minimalist, working to move along the plot and exposing the character psyche through outright examination. Lahiri seems to compromise any sort of aesthetic quality to her work in lieu of a more direct style that ultimately robs her stories of the emotional pay outs that the potency of each story have the potential to deliver. And, in all honesty, each story withholds a strong and surging humane quality to them that touch on inner desires and true issues of the psyche and social issues. “A Temporary Matter” touches on the inner most secrets held in a relationship and explores human intimacy and the secrets withheld to maintain that illusion. Albeit during the first reading it is engaging, the second reading proves uneventful where such phrases such as “it felt good to remember her as she was then” and “it made him shy” and it is in the revelation of a second reading that such language becomes a hindrance to appreciating it.

               Another story that has a fascinating subject matter is “The Interpreter of Maladies”, the namesake of the collection, where an Indian tour guide who has given up on his aspirations has his heart stolen by an American (American-Indian?) married woman who seeks him out to appease her sense of guilt in a breaking relationship. What Lahiri has as strength in her characters and their motivations and symbolic nuances, she loses in her writing the richness of the environment to simple language that is colloquial to a fault. She introduces tropes of figurative language, “[The monkey’s] long gray tails dangled like a series of ropes among the leaves”, that are colorful but seem otherwise devoid because the writing is so straight-forward that it offers little richness in the style. It tells, leaving nothing for the reader to imagine or guess. There is little to gain from second read-throughs.

               Ultimately, the writing underscores poignancy with such straight-forward writing. In “The Third and Final Continent”, we are given the story of an Indian student who takes a job and housing in Boston taking care of an elderly Mrs. Croft. Throughout the story the interaction of the two characters is very endearing, their respective stories and characters intermingling excellently in a way that illuminates a deeper humanity. But it’s seldom the writing itself that develops this intimacy, rather the inherent strength of the story itself. The story spends pages establishing the character and the admirable nature of Mrs. Croft, crafting a character worthy of adoration, and then, finally, her death, “Mrs. Croft’s death was the first death I mourned in America, for hers was the first life I had admired; she had left this world at last, ancient and alone, never to return”, is almost anti-climactic. If one were to argue that is the genius of the effect, then it would be a debatable stance, for what is more poignant is the ineffectual emptiness of usurping poignancy for the quotidian. The style is almost too minimalistic, jumping from observation to observation, action to action, like a film without the visual prowess of imagery and symbolism.

               Overall, the stylistic format is usually something reserved for taste, as her collections of stories certainly tell meaningful lives and have interesting characters, yet the writing, so blunt and devoid of whimsy does not feel as though it is something deserving of a Pulitzer Prize. It charms and seduces on the first read-through, being a very easy read certainly, but does not entice with language enough to merit anything gained from a second read through.