by Jhumpa Lahiri.

Knopf. 333 pages. $25.

BY SAM COALE
Special to the Journal

Very few authors write so well or so engagingly that you don’t want to come to the end. Jhumpa Lahiri, who grew up in Rhode Island (see profile on today’s Arts cover), author of the Pulitzer-Prize-winning collection, Interpreter of Maladies, and the novel, The Namesake (both of which I devoured), is one of them.

She probes, she lyrically analyzes, she circles and pounces. She sets up an encounter between her characters and watches it unfold, catching every elusive emotion, physical movement, attitude and posturing. Her paragraphs are long and full-bodied, Jamesian but without his filigreed, finicky dissecting of pale thought. Her people suffer and bleed, are often tense, resigned, elated, self-elusive, driven by desire complicated by Bengali bloodlines set down in American landscapes in and around Boston, professional, upper-middle-class, college-bound and complex. No matter what happens, blood will out.

To speak of her subjects is not to speak of extremes but of family ties, broken and unbroken, the subterranean guilts and lusts and mysterious motivations of real people. Yes, there’s the Bengali-American confrontation, the immigrant experience that shifts with each generation. There are the mixed marriages, parental expectations, the nearly rigid roles of gender within which sons and daughters are meant to structure their lives.

Should Ruma, married with a son, take in her widowed father? Why has Amit dragged his American wife Megan to the wedding of a friend at the boarding school where he met her and which he despised? Has Sudha’s dutiful goodness as the older sister in some ways contributed to the alcoholism and carelessness of her younger brother Rahul? How will the long relationship between Hema and Kaushik, from Boston to Italy, through stepmothers and war, turn out? And if Sang is truly in love with the Egyptian Farouk, who’s a notorious womanizer, what will happen if and when she finds out?

It’s as if Lahiri peels the skin off her subjects, but with grace, not with calculated indifference. She probes their souls as manifested in their habits and routines, their clothes, their books, their doubts. And you always feel that you want more — go deeper; keep going. Don’t stop!

The curse of the short story lies in its abruptness, but Lahiri’s in this collection are fully fleshed out, luminous, sad, often intoxicating in moments of sudden compulsion and connection.

Her epigraph is Hawthorne’s, delighted that his children were born in places other than Salem, thus striking “their roots in unaccustomed earth.” Lahiri explores these roots in the daily strangeness and familiarities of people and places. At one point she acknowledges “the fledgling family that had cracked open that morning, as typical and as terrifying as any other.”

Being human, we are all accustomed to that. UNACCUSTOMED EARTH,

samcoale@cox.net