The Vagueness of Her Discontent

"To the onlooker it is not even worth explaining why, once I returned to my 'roots,' I started to like Lahiri."

Mirror, Lily Mehta

Isabel Mehta is 23 years old and lives in New York City. She writes Everything is Copy.

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“You travel a certain distance, you desire and make decisions, and you’re left with recollections, some shimmering and some disturbing, that you’d rather not conjure up. But today, in the basilica, memory dominates, the deepest kind.”

– Jhumpa Lahiri, Roman Stories, “Dante Alighieri”

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So there I was, angry in high school English class. The year was 2020, and the seniors (especially the senior boys) regretfully carried around copies of a punchy poetry collection by a new South Asian poet. It was our unit on immigrant stories. I thought the collection was too sentimental and saturated with feeling — and students quickly dismissed it with eye rolls — but I knew the accent with which to pronounce the Urdu lyrics, and we would all take turns reading stanzas, and everyone would fumble them only to arrive at my seat where the nouns would roll off my tongue. One morning we had a debate on whether or not a specific poem was “good” and I found myself leading the cause. I was getting annoyed. I felt responsible for defending the work merely because of my identity, which made it seem like I agreed with what I was saying, which I very much didn’t, which made me more angry. After class, I asked my teacher why we were reading it.

“Well, we wanted something different. We used to read Jhumpa Lahiri.”

Jhumpa Lahiri, yes. I had heard the name before. This South Asian woman writer. She won a Pulitzer Prize in 2000 for her short story collection Interpreter of Maladies and was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2014 for “illuminating the Indian-American experience in beautifully wrought narratives of estrangement and belonging.” I hadn’t read any of her work so I thought maybe it was about time I did. I pulled The Namesake from my mother’s bookshelf one night after finishing my homework. After all these years, after all this time, I was finally reading grown-up South Asian literature, not poems about body hair. It was exciting. But the excitement was short-lived. Lahiri’s prose had a way about it. It wasn’t luscious like Fitzgerald or Hurston or specific and poetic like Coetzee. It was dry, mannered, and detached. It seemed as though Lahiri herself was disinterested in her subjects. Her characters all felt inaccessible and distant, and her tone was so flat. I found no entrypoints into her stories. I was expecting to feel a cleansing catharsis reading a work by the premiere South Asian-American writer of the twenty-first century. Instead, I felt even less seen than I did by the poet. If the trauma poetry was overdone, Lahiri felt underdone, depriving the reader of the characters’ deeper psychological epiphanies.

Ah, so be it, I thought. I went to college. Then, a budding literary magazine from Brooklyn called The Drift published a piece in 2021 called “Good Immigrant Novels” by Sanjena Sathian, who crystallized what I had felt since I picked up Lahiri as a teenager: “Lahiri avoids most of her characters’ internal landscapes.” Sathian adapts an argument from critic and poet Cathy Park Hong’s 2020 autobiographical collection Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning, who argues that writers of color are forced to write characters who act “gracious and grateful so white people will be comfortable enough to sympathize with their racialized experiences.” Lahiri’s “flattening,” Sathian continues, allows readers to feel educated without “interrogating either structural causes or their own complicity.” In other words, Lahiri makes the reader feel farther from, not closer to, the characters that we are supposed to feel close to — indeed the characters that she won a Pulitzer Prize for allegedly “illuminating” — and it was a lapse on our end, as readers, to believe she was moving us (Asian-Americans) forward.

The diagnosis felt right. “Sexy,” another one of Lahiri’s stories, concerns a white woman, Miranda, who begins sleeping with Dev, a married Indian man. Through her affair, Miranda learns and reflects on her own treatment of the only Indian family in her neighborhood growing up, the Dixits (they used to say, “The Dixits dig shit”). She feels guilty and sees “deserts and elephants and marble pavilions floating on lakes beneath a full moon.” Miranda is attracted to Dev, it seems, for — as our generation would say — “problematic” reasons. She certainly exoticizes him, and the reader is given very little of Dev’s real internal life aside from his cultural habits and demeanor. “Ultimately,” writes Sathian, “the story better serves readers like Miranda than readers like Dev.” Lahiri writes characters that are good, polite, and respectable. They never act or speak out of turn, moving within their little worlds while never making real, consequential choices.

“To be so good, so polite, so respectable, so lapped up by a white reading public, undermines our ability to be seen,” Sathian concludes.

This critique, I thought, was brilliant. It seemed that South Asian-American literature was either too much (like the poet) or too little (Lahiri’s plain and limited interiority), so I preferred to read and write about Jane Austen or Elizabeth Bishop. I found it tiring and burdensome to consume art “about” being South Asian because there was always this subliminal expectation, buried in the page, that I was supposed to, on some level, resonate with the piece, and it contaminated my experience of reading. I did not know, and could not figure out, how to avoid the ontological expectation. It would have been wonderful if I could have revered Lahiri as a literary heroine. Instead, her words and stories, now twenty-five years old, were exactly that to me; they were archaic — relics of a time when Lahiri was one of the few writing about South Asian immigrants in America, when representation really, really mattered. Lahiri, too, worn from this expectation, left for Italy and published her last English language fiction in 2013. I decided to study English in college, but I put her, and these concerns, to rest.

Four years later, I was surprised, then, to see Lahiri’s name light up my phone screen in the June 2025 issue of The New Yorker. It was a new short story, “Jubilee.” I clicked, and I read. It was as though I was reading a different writer entirely. I rendered myself moved. Lahiri’s characters felt alive. The story was vibrant. Had I been wrong about her? Had she changed, or had I?

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I was not supposed to end up in Elmhurst, Queens, but that is where I moved after college. My grandmother still owned the apartment she bought in the Eighties when she came from India, which she had been renting to various tenants since she moved away fifteen years ago. Before she left Elmhurst, my family would often drive from Philadelphia during the summer to pay her and my grandfather a visit, swinging from the metal monkey bars in the park, eating daal and Froot Loops under their two kitchen calendars (one Hindu, one American), flicking wooden discs on the carrom board with our nail beds. The place is spacious and worth a lot more now than it was back then. Every morning poured in luscious dawn light from the kitchen window facing Broadway. The M and R train rumbled below the building, which I liked. I never met a single person in Elmhurst who spoke English without an accent of some kind, and I liked that, too.

But there were ghosts. The ghosts weren’t real — are they ever? — but because my dad, grandmother, late grandfather, late great-grandmother, and aunt lived together in the one-bed for decades, it kind of felt like they were. Every one of us has probably cracked an egg by that kitchen window. My grandfather’s name is still on some mail. My great aunt and uncle have lived exactly two floors above for thirty years.

To the onlooker it is not even worth explaining why, once I returned to my “roots,” I started to like Lahiri. She writes about immigrants — with whom I was surrounded — and those caught between worlds, which I was, lodged then in an ancestral purgatory. Finally, I was seen in Lahiri’s work. She had not changed. I had.

That explanation would make for a wonderfully neat essay. The problem is, I still did not identify with, resonate with, or even remember any of the characters in “Jubilee.” I wasn’t even sure if I liked it. It was the following passage, instead, that I could not forget. The narrator’s mother has just heard the news of her mother’s passing over the phone, from her brother in India:

“For the rest of that night, we all had to lie side by side on a sheet my mother spread on the floor at the foot of their bed. My mother neither cried nor slept. She soothed my sister and gave her a bottle of milk. I don’t know why lying on the floor after hearing the news seemed necessary to her, whether it was connected to some ritual of mourning, and I never asked her to explain it to me.”

This is the classic Lahiri style: restrained. As Sathian writes, she “shows, not tells.” She does not say, “My mother was grieving, devastated" or offer the narrator’s perspective on her own grandmother’s death. Instead, the narrator (a child) recounts events like one would for a police report: “We all had to lie side by side…at the foot of their bed.” The detail, “She soothed my sister and gave her a bottle of milk” may or may not be Lahiri’s nod to the prevailing burdens of motherhood despite cataclysmic grief. Or, just a detail. The criticism Sathian and Park Hong impose on Lahiri is that she doesn’t make clear which. Right when Lahiri may have an opportunity to say something, when her characters may have an opportunity to do something, to actually react to their circumstances with unmannered rage, even to speak at nonquiet volume, they don’t. Both characters — the mother and the narrator — react to the news of death with distance, ambiguity, and privacy. The narrator never even asks her mother, in the end, why they all had to lie on the floor.

It is Lahiri’s commitment to the narrative distance between herself and her characters, despite the vastness and depth of the characters’ situations and emotions, that bothers the critics. It once bothered me, too. Because, as critic and essayist Vivian Gornick writes in The Situation and the Story, “Our age is characterized by the assertion of a ‘serious life,’ which is a life ‘one tries to make sense of and bear witness to.’” And a “serious life” is also an interior life. Lahiri’s stories may have “illuminated” the experience of immigrants as per the bar for representation in the early 2000s, but now, two decades later, they don’t make the cut. Her stories are diluted and do not inspire real contemplation, real change. Our generation wants to ask more of artists. Naturally, Lahiri is re-interrogated perhaps as an artistic symptom of a larger problem.

This criticism of Lahiri, though, does not ask the question: to what is Lahiri attentive? There was something in the passage above that resonated with me the day I read it: “For the rest of that night, we all had to lie side by side on a sheet my mother spread on the floor at the foot of their bed.” I happened to be on the Long Island Rail Road (LIRR) back to Woodside after spending the afternoon with my grandmother in Long Island. Over tea, she recalled the way relatives visiting from India would sleep on her Elmhurst floor, side by side, recovering after their long journey. Yes, I had seen this image before. Sitting on the train, I felt a simmering resonance.

Notice how Lahiri conjures sharp images and nouns: “milk,” “bottle,” “bed,” “sheet.” The opening of “Jubilee” is as follows: “A wooden ruler with the etched faces of Henry VIII’s six wives running down the middle; ticket stubs from Hampton Court and the Chamber of Horrors, where we walked ahead of our mothers, hand in hand; a few wrappers of Dairy Milk.” Consider, too, the opening of another story she wrote twenty-five years earlier: “In the autumn of 1971 a man used to come to our house, bearing confections in his pocket and hopes of ascertaining the life or death of his family.” What is going on in these sentences? Lahiri’s tone strikes the reader as dry because it is. When in the first person, her stories are often told as recollection (“A man used to come to our house”). When in the third person, they are often in the past tense. Just because her tone is detached, though, does not mean her style is. The composition of these sentences is dense and packed with detail. Open nearly any Lahiri story or novel and you will see that her architecture of image upon image builds moments that are startlingly clear despite her rhetoric distance. If Lahiri’s tone is distant because she welcomes the reader into the past, after things have already happened, then her style formally constructs the past as a vibrant artifact of memory. She does not take the reader deep into the minds of her characters, but deep into their pasts. Just as my grandmother was recounting for me that day a distant, detailed memory, Lahiri’s narrators seem to collect things, too — items, people, colors, hopes, dreams, ticket stubs — in order to reconstruct the past, for the reader, in the present. Lahiri’s “distance,” then, described by critics as a point of weakness, may be the distance of memory, which she stylistically represents through her technical use of detail and external appearances, the grounding principle of her repertoire.

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“The truth is that his criticism of society is almost exclusively moral. Hence the utter lack of any constructive suggestion anywhere in his work.” This is a line from George Orwell’s essay “Charles Dickens,” written in 1940. If Lahiri neglects her characters’ psychological worlds, then Dickens abandons them entirely, creating fixtures and caricatures borne from excessive physical detail, worlds that delineate clearly between good and bad and never suggest, or explicitly interrogate, institution. His stories are digestible and fun, and one can close his novels and feel light, satisfied, and at ease. This bothered Orwell — like Lahiri’s apparent platitudes bothered Sathian and Park Hong — like they bothered me. Orwell raises his issues with Dickens (his criticisms are many) only until he pivots, surprisingly, near the essay’s end: “His radicalism is of the vaguest kind… the vagueness of his discontent.” Dickens’s fixation on externality, on never really saying anything about anything but instead allowing the reader to see reality as a product of the novel, is why you see not Dickens himself in the work, Orwell says, but his attitude towards the world: his “discontent.”

Perhaps it is right to say that if Lahiri summoned a more gratuitous, empathetic tone in her work and was less apathetic towards her subjects, her characters would feel richer — more like human beings and less like human shells. But with a closer eye, one can feel, and see, Lahiri’s discontent. To give an example, she borrows Dickens’s use of what Orwell calls "unnecessary detail” to describe Mr. Pirzada, a Pakistani man who works at the local university on a research grant while his wife and seven daughters live still in Dacca, a city decimated during the Pakistani Civil War. “Before eating Mr. Pirzada always did a curious thing. He took out a plain silver watch without a band, which he kept in his breast pocket, held it briefly to one of his tufted ears, and wound it with three swift flicks of his thumb and forefinger.” In classic Lahiri style, the reader is in the past (“always did”). We are removed. We also do not know how Mr. Pirzada feels, entering this home of Indian strangers. Later, he sets his watch to “the local time in Dacca, eleven hours ahead.” Why does he do that? We never find out. Lahiri does not bury, as Orwell says, any “constructive suggestions” in her work. Instead, the image elicits a feeling of discomfort. In the precision of Mr. Pirzada’s winding of his pocket watch, we sense a fixation, a loneliness. For all of her style, which we can call plain or minimalist or reserved, one leaves Lahiri with emotional perception. Something like a vague discontent with the way things are not good, and should be better.

Reading “Jubilee” that day on the LIRR, I was still the same person I was in high school, looking to art by South Asian artists to be seen for my racial identity. Yet it became clear to me that after all these years, Lahiri had not changed either. She had always been committed to the same realist project, which is a project that sees the world, rather than bestowing on others, regardless of their race, the privilege of feeling seen. By critiquing Lahiri for the sake of “better” representation as a teenager, I believed I was making a moral argument — that good art represents people the right way, and bad art doesn’t. But really, I was saying that good art represents me the right way, and bad art doesn’t. To say that good art is a good thing is moral. But to assert that the project of a writer like Lahiri should be to close that distance, to interrogate interiors to inspire feelings of interrogation and change in others, to make me feel seen — that is not moral, but prescriptive. Identity, of course, exists well beyond the rise and fall of identity politics. Blinded by that movement, and the subsequent criticism of it, I failed to see the politics of my own identity, a more enduring phenomenon that would have enriched my first reading of Lahiri had I been aware of it. Because it is this issue with which Lahiri is most concerned: not the way in which racial identity should be represented, but the way in which identity, or the fact of being a person at all, informs one’s place in the global and domestic world.

During this summer’s heat wave in New York City, I started to wake up with red welts all over my arms. I thought I was allergic to cockroaches or that I had carpet beetles in my bed. I began sleeping on my couch in the large living room that I never completely furnished. When the welts would shrink, I would shift back to my bed, only to wake up again itching, and float back to the couch. Before the welts, it was the man who I thought was following me in the winter. Once he yelled at me in another language (Hindi, maybe) on the M train, and I saw him after my runs, and on the street, until one day I found him sleeping in the subway station. I never saw him again. Sometimes, I would just smell my grandfather in the hallway, turn around, and no one would be there. It should have been a glorious cultural homecoming, but as the months went on in Elmhurst, I had a growing sense that my being in the apartment needed to come to an end; I felt both physically and mentally rejected by it, like I was violating some kind of law of time, or physics, by trying to reactivate a dormant energy. Nothing was happening, it had all already happened, and being there felt like I was dancing on the sacred remains of so many lives already lived.

In the end, I couldn’t cope. I had been planning my move to Manhattan well before Lahiri returned to me, but I cannot help but wonder now if reading her story was my final moment of discontent. One often revisits old works and realizes their interpretation of them was wrong or immature. But my return to Lahiri has little to do with my appreciation for my racial identity as a renewed source of pride, even after spending a year steeped in familial history. I still do not speak the language or cook the food, and I’m still not an immigrant. But, through her characters just being who they are, as specific beings in the world, Lahiri illuminates the relevance of my identity as a person who moves through time and who must keep moving, an identity I have come to realize as being more political — more important to myself and to the world — than any other. Because the longer I live, the more past, or memory, I accumulate. Lahiri reminds me there may be something good, even useful, about that growing distance.