As with her previous books, the new book too will attract readers of all ages, Booklist said. 'Lahiri writes insightfully about childhood, while the romantic infatuations and obstacles to true love will captivate teens,' it declared.
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Although the characters in her new book also include immigrant parents, she says she has spent more time with characters who are the children of immigrants. 'I find that interesting because when you grow up the child of an immigrant, you are always -- or at least I was -- very conscious of what it means or might mean to be uprooted or to uproot yourself,' she told Atlantic.com recently. 'One is conscious of that without even having ever done it. I knew what my parents had gone through -- not feeling rooted.'
Soon Lahiri will start an extensive reading tour, taking considerable time off her Brooklyn, New York home and her husband and two children.
In a way, she launched the reading tour in early March when she read at MIT. It was her third appearance at the school. Before reading, Lahiri expressed how 'MIT endures in (her) family's mythology' because it is where her father had his first job in the US in 1969,' MIT Tech wrote. He stayed there for about a year. Rhode Island has been the home of her parents for several decades.
As a result, MIT seems to 'always make an appearance' in Lahiri's writing, it added. In The Namesake, for instance, Asoke Ganguli is an MIT professor. Lahiri read a story, Hell-Heaven, which centered on a Bengali family living at Central Square and their relationship with a young MIT graduate student from India. In the story, an Indian mother of a young girl befriends an Indian grad student. But the surrogate son disappoints her and her husband when he falls in love with an American woman. Disappointment is a mild word to use, as the readers will discover. For Lahiri never writes anything that is simplified.
The audience at MIT laughed knowingly, wrote Boston.com, when Lahiri read a section noting how difficult it was for a wealthy man from India who 'had never had to do so much as pour himself a glass of water' to adjust to new life. 'Life as a graduate student in Boston was a cruel shock,' she writes, 'and in his first month he lost nearly 20 pounds.'
She also told the audience that her stories in Unaccustomed Earth largely focus on 'children who are now adults, straddling a divide.' Some of her stories capture the experience of being in the first generation of one's family in America and the experience of then 'raising [one's own] children in this country.'
Lahiri says she looks forward to intelligent conversation about her craft and stories. But she gets tired facing the ubiquitous questions such as her focus on Bengalis and her views on arranged marriages.
Also read: 'Indian brides look very beautiful'
