Unaccustomed Earth
by Jhumpa Lahiri
(Knopf) $25

After the unparalleled success of both Interpreter of Maladies and The Namesake, I was braced for Unaccustomed Earth to disappoint. Jhumpa Lahiri has earned the right to relax a little, throw out a stinker filled with lazy prose and creepily mixed metaphor, where virginity clings like a barnacle to the racehorse thighs of an ugly Bengali duckling.

But thankfully, Unaccustomed Earth is as absorbing as its predecessors, and Lahiri's prose continues to be thoughtful, measured, and unexpected. As in her previous works, this collection of short stories focuses on the lives of transplanted Bengalis, portraying the tensions and unacknowledged burdens that weigh on generations of families raised in radically different environments.

Her talent is for capturing the intricate bonds of loyalty and resentment present within families of every cultural background. The premises of these stories are simple—a widower visiting his daughter, a couple's first weekend away from their children—but the absorbing way she examines even the most petty or mundane reaction of her characters speaks to readers' experiences. "[Amit] felt the same resentment that often seized him after he cleaned up the kitchen and bathed Maya and Monika and put them to bed... tonight nothing censored his peevishness."

Even Lahiri's description of a vitreous eye clump is poetic, and neatly captures the thematic sense of loss that is present in each story: "[The eye clump] did not affect his driving, or his picture-taking. And yet if felt like an invasion of the part of his body, the physical sense that was most precious: something that betrayed him and also refused to abandon him." Just like my goddamned family, the reader concludes. Unaccustomed Earth is a quick, engrossing read. It's the kind of book that makes you sit up a little straighter and swoon, simultaneously.