Interpreter of Maladies

"The other thing that is distinctive about Boston, which brings us to Lahiri is that Boston was—and is again lately—a tremendously international city. But that wasn’t true for much of the twentieth century. It’s remade by its English immigrants in the seventeenth century, to a certain degree by Scots, Irish, Germans, French, as well as Africans in the eighteenth century, and fundamentally by the Irish influx in the nineteenth century. But it doesn’t become a place of wildly disparate tongues and languages until much more recently. That late twenty-first century city of many immigrant populations is one that Lahiri and other novelists, such as Zadie Smith in White Teeth , get us into. We are the largest college town the world has ever known. There’s something around the order of 300,000 students and a score of institutions, which have grown hugely in power-scale and complexity since the founding of Harvard in the 1630s. Higher Ed, and its derivative sectors in tech and biotech, are the largest employers in the metropolitan area. That fact is remaking everything from culture and economics to our spiralling housing costs in the twenty-first century. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Lahiri’s communities of Bengalis are exemplary of a new porousness that’s not always peaceful. It’s a global city in ways that it was when Winthrop was keeping his journal, and in ways that Horton attested to. Lahiri’s characters are often knowledge workers, of one kind or another, whose worlds are diasporic. I think she has a great knack for showing both the closeness and the distance of peoples and cities. They seem so close together at the same time, they’re incredibly far apart. Many of her characters experience Boston as their embarkation port in the New World, as a place of opportunity but also of mortification. She uses that word ‘mortify’ quite a lot as a way to describe how people treat their elders. For example, her stories are a place where women often don’t have the opportunities or the security that they have in the world that they were leaving. As in Lukas, the revolutionary heritage hovers, sometimes in interesting, flickering ways. In the terrific story, “When Mr. Prizada Came to Dine,” where Bengali émigrés are watching what turns out to be the birth of Bangladesh on TV in their college town, the narrator tells us she hasn’t learned the history of Partition, which is of her ancestral history, because in her Massachusetts school they’re drilling the history of the thirteen colonies—Boston history."