Amidst a literary landscape of Hawthorne’s terrified Puritans and Frost’s quiet villages, Jhumpa Lahiri has emerged to provide New England literature with an entirely new setting. At first glance, Lahiri’s world shares little more than place-names with her predecessors: there is the Walden Pond of Thoreau, where her characters may take a walk; the Charles River of James, where they might swim; and the Harvard Yard of that other James, where they attend university; but Lahiri’s world, populated by exquisitely educated, well-off Bengalis, has very little to do with Old New England.
At least, that is an initial reaction. On further examination, many of the most durable themes of New England literature are present in Lahiri’s fiction alongside the strongest themes of immigrant literature. In Unaccustomed Earth, Lahiri’s latest collection of short stories (2008), attempt to make Old New England reach New New England is especially evident.
“Hell-Heaven”
In one of the strongest stories in the collection, “Hell-Heaven”, Pranab, a young Bengali grad student at MIT, homesick and frustrated, encounters Aparna and her daughter Usha crossing Harvard Yard. He approaches them and Aparna takes pity on him and invites him home to dinner. As in much of Lahiri’s fiction, the dominant image here is that of the immigrant striver, the well-educated Indian who has come to the United States – usually Boston – to gain a top-quality education.
