Unaccustomed Earth

Lahiri’s newest collection, her first since 1999’s Pulitzer-winning Interpreter of Maladies, explores the disconnect between people, even those in close quarters. Most of the characters are Indian, and the gulf often lies between first-generation American children and their anachronistic parents. The insularity of the settings, often gray coastal towns, creeps into the natures of the characters—they’re secretive and closed, much of their stories lived in their heads. But under a sterile surface boils lust and misery, mirrored in the sensual details of food and dress that animate the dim landscapes.

In the title story, a newly widowed man visits his daughter’s home. She’s tormented by her sense of responsibility to him, while he counts the days until he can escape. And “Hell-Heaven” charts the heartbreak of a married woman who’s fallen in love with a family friend; she reveals how far her misery pushed her years later, to her semi-estranged daughter. Lahiri’s prose, seamless to the point of invisibility, feels forced only in the collection’s weakest, “Only Goodness”—a mawkish portrayal of a young man’s descent into alcoholism.

While Lahiri expertly creates verisimilitude in just a handful of pages, the stories’ brevity can rob them of their power to stun or entrance. The book’s second half, a three-story cycle titled “Hema and Kaushik,” has space to breathe, and the results are infinitely more moving. The characters are thrown together in their early teens by their parents’ friendship, then reunite years later in Italy. Their brief love affair is the greatest distillation of the book’s themes of loneliness, loss and the rarity of real connection.

Lahiri reads Tuesday 8 at the Swedish American Museum Center.