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RECENT REVIEWS
BY TED GIOIA

2008

Jhumpa Lahiri [click here]
Joseph O'Neill [click here]
Richard Price [click here]
Tobias Wolff [click here]
Donald Ray Pollock [click here]
Charles Bock [click here]
Geraldine Brooks [click here]

2007
Alan Bennett [click here]
Mario Vargas Llosa [click here]
Denis Johnson [click here]
Philip Roth [click here]
Ann Patchett  [click here]
Junot Diaz [click here]
Matt Ruff  [click here]
Ryszard Kapuściński  [click here]
Roberto Bolaño  [click here]
Jack Kerouac  [click here]
John Leland  [click here]
Ian McEwan [click here]
Khaled Hosseini  [click here]
Don DeLillo  [click here]
Michael Chabon  [click here]
Haruki Murakami  [click here]
Jonathan Lethem  [click here]
Michael Ondaatje  [click here]
Steven Hall  [click here]
"Writers, unlike most people, tell their best
lies when they are alone."
Michael Chabon

"I have always imagined that Paradise will be
a kind of library."   
Jorge Luis Borges

Make no mistake, those who write long books
have nothing to say.  Of course those who
write short books have even less to say."    
Mark Danielewski

"Outside of a dog, a book is man's best
friend.  Inside of a dog it's too dark to read."  
Groucho Marx

"Never judge a book by its movie."  
J.W. Eagan
Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri

Reviewed by Ted Gioia

I have spent too many evenings in hotel rooms
in various Asian cities, wasting my time watching
television shows in languages I don't understand.
Then again, I have found that I don't need to know
the native tongue to recognize a recurring theme
in the local dramas and soap operas.

These shows always revolve around unhappy
parents - stern fathers and grieving mothers -
who constantly try to manipulate and interfere
in the lives of the younger generation. I can't
translate a single word of dialogue, but just the
looks on the faces of that aggrieved mom and
exasperated daughter sum up decades of inter-
generational conflict. If looks could kill . . . no Bollywood actress would
live past the age of twenty-five.

This is the world that Jhumpa Lahiri captures so evocatively in her latest
collection of stories Unaccustomed Earth. Her characters move freely
from country to country, continent to continent, job to job, but the
psychological ties of family and culture are not so easy to leave behind.
Each of her narratives is both firmly embedded in the here-and-now of
the Indian ex-pat experience, but also full of the resonance of the
inescapable past.

The parents invariably have expectations, typically unrealistic ones, as
they move to the West yet want to resist its inevitable influence on the
next generation. They demand that their children excel and succeed in
their new setting, but not become shaped by its values. Even small
things - a glass of Johnny Walker (a brand which appears a dozen or so
times in this book, and is always a symbol of decadent Westernizing),
make-up, an accent - are scrutinized and judged. And every now and
then a big bombshell drops: a child wants to date, or even marry,
someone who is not Indian.

It is to Lahiri's credit that she can work so many variations on these
simple themes. She has a deft touch in delineating characters and
shaping scenes. Above all, she is able to build tension in relationships
between contrary characters, while deferring conflict, allowing subtle
changes to play out gradually. Her tales are psychologically rich without
the baggage of the so-called psychological novel. Everything in the
story moves lightly and at a measured pace, even when the subject
matter itself is heavy: a brother's alcoholism, a step-brother's betrayal,
a jilted lover's anguish and revenge.

Lahiri is sensitive to the contradictions inherent in the lives of Indians
abroad. "Cinema of a certain period was the one thing my mother loved
wholeheartedly about the West," a character relates. "She herself
never wore a skirt — she considered it indecent — but she could recall,
scene by scene, Audrey Hepburn's outfits in any given movie." Such
small, but poignant details, contribute to the vividness and power of
the stories in Unaccustomed Earth.

Lahiri will sometimes surprise us with a plot twist that runs counter to
all our expectations. In the title story (really almost a novella), it is the
widowed father who tries to hide his new romantic relationship from his
daughter, and we enjoy the spectacle of the secretive parent - a
reversal of he typical roles in a Lahiri story. Her finest moments here,
however, come in the closing three stories, which stand together as a
single, powerful tale. A Westernized Indian woman, with a PhD and a
growing reputation as a scholar, rebounds from an unhappy affair and
decides to settle for an arranged marriage with a traditional Indian man
she hardly knows.

The basic premise here is straightforward, but Lahiri builds up to this
conflict in carefully developed scenes. Every situation is a stepping
stone up to the eventual conflict between traditional values and
modern ways, but each interlude and event draws energy from its own
inherent drama. Lahiri's story, despite its conventionality, is completely
free of the trite or predictable. The readers, for their part, will hardly
realize where they are being led. And Lahiri saves a final, unexpected
surprise for the end, delivering a closing cadence that is so powerful, it
is almost out of character for this author, who usually revels in smaller,
more intimate scenes.

Readers who are looking for flashy experimentation or linguistic
pyrotechnics are advised to go elsewhere. But don't be fooled by the
modest exterior to this author's prose. Lahiri is a great writer, who
controls her subject, and constructs her tales with a master's touch.
She may already have a Pulitzer Prize to here credit, but with stories
like these, Jhumpa Lahiri still seems to be hitting new heights.

This review originally appeared on Blogcritics.
Great Books Guide
Netherland by Joseph O'Neill

Reviewed by Ted Gioia

With summer on its way, let's curl up with a novel that deals with that
great American sport . . . cricket.

Cricket! you exclaim. What's American about that?
But listen to Chuck Ramkissoon, the flamboyant
West Indian at the center of Joseph O'Neill's recent
novel Netherland, and he will set you straight.

"Cricket was the first modern team sport in America,"
Ramkissoon explains. "It came before baseball and
football. Cricket has been played in New York since
the 1770s . . . Cricket matches were watched by
thousands of fans. It was a professional sport
reported in all the newspapers. There were clubs
all over the country. . . So it is wrong to see cricket
in America as most people see it . . . an immigrant
sport. It is a bona fide American pastime."

If your eyes are already glazing over at this, you may want to pass on
Netherland, with its Field of Dreams celebration of Yankee cricket.
Perhaps you (like me) have been stuck at dinner or, even worse, on a
long flight, next to a cricket enthusiast, who will quote every statistic
and will elaborate, ad nauseam, on the differences between a bouncer
and a bunsen, a flipper and a floater. And did you ever hear about
Dennis Lillee and Javed Miandad in 1981 . . .

Hey, wake up! No matter if your favorite cricket was Pinocchio's
sidekick, you may want to give this novel a chance. Even I got caught
up in Ramkissoon's plans to convert an old airfield into the New York
Cricket Club, with two thousand members shelling out a grand each in
dues, plus initiation fees; twelve exhibition matches every summer, with
eight thousand fans paying fifty bucks per ticket. Just dream for a
moment: India playing Pakistan in New York, with 70 million watching
via TV and Internet in India alone, and Nike and Coke lining up for
sponsorship deals.

But Ramkissoon, the mastermind of this scheme, is not everything he
seems. Netherland is written from the perspective of stock analyst and
weekend cricketeer, Hans van den Broek, a hopelessly passive
spectator on his own life, who is charmed by these plans, but soon
discovers unsavory sides to his new friend. In short, not everything
about Ramkissoon is quite cricket, as they say.

Van den Broek's own life is in disarray. His wife leaves him, and moves
with their only son to London. He has no close friends, and spends his
time with oddball neighbors, most notably a strange Turkish man who
likes who dress up like an angel, wings and all. In the great tradition of
American narrators, from Nick Carraway (in The Great Gatsby) to Augie
March, Hans get swept away by the dreams of others, ignoring all the
warning signs that a more skeptical participant (not to mention the
readers themselves) would quickly observe.

As a result, the great cricket novel gradually turns into something
darker and more multi-layered. Van den Broek drifts apart from his
friend and decides to move to London, and though he is rewarded by
renewed hopes for his marriage, he continues to wonder about his
cricket-loving companion. Ramkissoon, for his part, gets caught up in a
downward spiral. A sports novel seems to be turning into a crime story.

Yet our novelist is cagey and never provides us with all the details.
Chuck Ramkissoon will eventually disappear from the book's page,
leaving behind many unanswered questions. Yet he is a brilliantly
conceived character, and his presence alone gives life to a novel that,
without this one spark, might strike most of us Yanks as more tedious
than a three day test match.


This article originally appeared on Blogcritics