Book Review: Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri

Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies is a collection of stories that shows the trials of life, everyday life, for characters whose lives are immersed in Indian culture, slightly in some cases, completely in others. Lahiri’s refreshing style is characterized by an objective narrative style, austere descriptions, simple, unencumbered dialogue, and painfully open resolutions.

Lahiri uses third person narration in all but two of her short stories. This narration style allows Lahiri to easily present slices from her characters lives, unimpeded by the complicated task of delving into personal psyche. She deftly uses objective description in the third person to successfully reveal the motivations and personalities of her characters. Even in the two stories where she uses first person narration, the facts are presented with objectivity and she spends relatively little time dwelling in the narrating character’s head.

Lahiri’s style is clean, austere, and at times, cold. Her simplicity of language may lead one to question the merits of this collection or her talents as an author. Ultimately, though, her clean style makes for easy reading and is much of the appeal of this collection.

The style of her writing made getting into each of the stories very easy. In the first two or three pages of each there is a subtle “catch” that draws the reader into the story, even without the reader’s full awareness. These catches are so slight that it is a stretch to call them by their more formal term, conflict. She presents such stunning slices of life that it takes reading through the story again to recognize that all the traditional elements of a short story are indeed present.

The climax in each story falls approximately two pages from the end. Lahiri does a marvelous job of not resolving much with the resolutions, but instead leaving things, almost painfully, open: showing how real life continues on for the characters. Some of her resolutions show more finality than others. The resolution in “The Treatment of Bibi Haldar” showed the most closure of any resolution in the collection. This resolution gave the story a fable-like quality. The resolution reads, “But there was no point in carrying out an investigation. She was, to the best of our knowledge, cured” (172). This mythic quality may be partly attributed to the non-mainstream cultural and historical context in which it is set. For the most part, though, it is this strong resolution that leaves a “happily ever after” taste in the readers mouth. The resolutions in the other stories seem more like big gulps of air in brief moments of understanding before the struggles continue.

Another element I found fascinating in this collections was the use of dialogue. It seemed overly common, at times forced, and sometimes left me wondering why Lahiri had presented such a mundane interaction. Adverbs and descriptions of any other kind that would tell about the tone of the conversations are essentially absent. As a result I was left feeling that the conversations were dry and forced. However, this is yet another element of Lahiri’s austere, “show, don’t tell” style. The conversations are left open to interpretation, and the contextual clues give most everything necessary to interpret the dialogue.
The dry tone of the dialogue also comes closer to realistically portraying actual human verbal interaction. Sanjeev and Twinkle are very believable characters in “This Blessed House” when they have the following interaction discussing the stew Twinkle has made:

“How did you make it?”
“I made it up.”
“What did you do?”
“I just put some things into the pot and added the malt vinegar at the end.”
“How much vinegar?” (144)

Instead of adding distracting interjections like “he asked expectantly” or “she replied dully” the conversation stands on its own and comes alive based on the readers own conversational experience.

In this collection Lahiri has developed a clean, unencumbered style that poignantly and vividly depicts everyday life that is subtly, and at times overpoweringly, infused with Indian culture. Her stories are unabashed and unavoidable. Lahiri’s clean narrative style contributes to the ease with which these stories are received and, perhaps the point being, interpreted.