Eat, Pray, Love

Dara writes:

Elizabeth Gilbert, the author of the best-selling book of spiritual exploration, Eat, Pray, Love, has a remarkably engaging voice. Rarely does the conversational tone translate effectively into prose. But Ms. Gilbert nails it. Her style is a marvel of humor, sassiness, and folksiness. In a word: irresistible. And why should one resist? Readers haven't, as her book has sold a gazillion copies.

Good for her...and for Jhumpa Lahiri? I noticed an interesting similarity between Gilbert's book and Lahiri's latest. Both end on a beach--the former near Bali and the latter in Thailand--around the time of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. Lahiri's relentlessly fatalistic outlook dictates that the catastrophe will claim one of her characters, while Gilbert's doe-eyed optimism requires that her characters remain safe. Is there any way Lahiri was rebutting Gilbert in the end of her work? Probably not. But I like to contemplate the possibility.

Lahiri, and Indian American writer, has her antennae up for racism. Gilbert devotes one third of her book to time she spent in an Ashram in India--time during which she describes Indian culture as delightful and Indian girls as eminently charming. Her descriptions are a tad prone to caricature--which perhaps irked Lahiri? Perhaps she wanted to puncture the pretty bubble Gilbert draws around South Asia.

The similar descriptions that conclude their books struck me. Lahiri's character Kaushik lowers himself over the side of the boat and "lets go." Later we learn the tsunami claimed him. Gilbert--herself a character in her book--and her lover Felipe dip into the water from their boat and stride safely to shore. Many people dismiss Gilbert's book as whiny chick-lit. Perhaps Lahiri is one of those who can resist Gilbert's charms? Shunning fantasy, Lahiri plants a flag in the territory of realism.

Unaccustomed Earth

Dara writes:

The work of Indian American novelist and short story writer Jhumpa Lahiri is chick lit for intellectuals. Reading her work is as easy as but infinitely more rewarding than reading Us magazine. I slip right in and walk away fortified, not enervated, as I feel after reading the tabloids.

Which is not to say that Lahiri’s work is at all sensational or exploitative. Just that it grabs my attention instantly. I started her latest book, a story collection, on a plane. I needed to dispel my fear of crashing. I immersed myself in the book and within seconds was in Seattle, where Unaccustomed Earth begins.

What makes Lahiri’s writing so seductive? Love, for one thing. It is not just that Lahiri writes about love, though she often does. It is that she evinces love for her characters and her readers. She is generous. She takes care and time to exhibit every detail of her characters’ lives.

For another thing, Lahiri speaks plainly. She seems constitutionally incapable of being pretentious on the page, nor does she ever confuse us with prose that is experimental. Like Allegra Goodman, a writer I adore, she is telling a story. Period. Other reviewers, such as Liesl Schillinger in the New York Times Book Review, have noted how Lahiri’s mechanics are invisible, how she seems to clear a path for her characters to develop on their own. I think this quality is what allows the reader to immerse herself in the stories as though in a warm, perfumed bath.

Finally, there is Lahiri’s gift for detail. Her language might be plain, but it is always accurate. In re-reading her latest book, I noticed that no scene was sketched-in vaguely. Lahiri observes her surroundings with a scientist’s meticulousness.

Funny, because she writes an awful lot about scientists. One complaint I have about her latest book is that her stories have become a bit familiar: the immigrant Indian family that lives in a Boston suburb. The father works at MIT. The ungrateful Americanized kids resent their parents’ immigrant ways. Yet family stories, like life, are always the same in principle—they differ in the myriad details. Reading Lahiri’s work reassures me. It tells me that my life, in all its banality, is worthwhile.

Ruma is the protagonist of this latest book’s title story. She is a stay-at-home mom to her young son Akash and is pregnant with her second child. She used to be a career woman but that changed when she and her family moved to Seattle. Her father travels and has done so since Ruma’s mother died. When her father comes to visit Seattle, Ruma’s husband says they should invite the father to live with them. But Ruma feels quite conflicted about this idea; when he comes, his visit evokes many memories, not all of which are pleasant. She finally decides in favor of inviting her father to stay, but he won’t. He doesn’t say why. In the end, she figures it out and helps her father with a small act of kindness so poignant it made me cry. Lahiri’s bold emphasis on the everyday things that change us makes her BIG ending all the more incongruous.

Lahiri’s new collection entails two parts. The first part contains four stories, of which Ruma’s tale is one, and the second includes three stories that are connected. In the first of these three connected tales, boy meets girl. This story, “Once in a Lifetime,” is told from the girl’s perspective. The second, “Year’s End,” is told years later from the boy’s perspective. Quickly we guess what the third part will be: boy and girl will meet. And they do, in Europe as it happens, after decades apart.

Despite that the structure is obvious, it propelled me on: I pulsed with anticipation for part three. Still, I know that Lahiri likes to be true to life, so I didn’t expect a ride into the sunset. I needed only recall Gogol’s tortuous path in Lahiri’s last book, The Namesake, to confirm that this is a writer who does not wrap her endings up in a nice bow. Melodrama does not have much place in a Lahiri story. Imagine my surprise, then, at the whopping, deus ex machina conclusion of “Going Ashore,” the last story in Unaccustomed Earth.

One thing that had already made me wary of the second part of Unaccustomed Earth was its political nature. The male protagonist, Kaushik, is a war photographer who laments the plight of the Palestinians. Support for the Palestinian movement is a favorite cause of the Left, and an inflammatory one at that. Lahiri’s stories are so quiet that the presence of this cause celebre jarred me.

I will not give away the ending, but suffice it to say that Lahiri imposes on Kaushik a global event. In the context of the story it rises completely out of the blue. For such a fine, understated writer, this seems highly uncharacteristic. It utterly took me out of the story—literally. I was lying in bed reading it and bolted upright with indignation.

I have been surprised that other reviewers have not hit on this ill-fitting device. Michiko Kakutani in the Times does note the sensational ending, but says: “In the hands of a less talented writer it’s an ending that might have seemed melodramatic or contrived, but as rendered by Ms. Lahiri it possesses the elegiac and haunting power of tragedy.”

If Lahiri’s work is “chick lit,” it is of the most refined order—which makes this tabloid ending all the more unexpected.

'The Picture of Lucian Freud'

THE NEW YORK SUN

'The Picture of Lucian Freud'
BY JAMES PANERO
November 7, 2007

Isn't it ironic that postwar art has traded one Freud for another. The very influence that Sigmund once exerted in the 1950s, his grandson Lucian, now in his mid-80s, might claim today. John Currin, Elizabeth Peyton, Lisa Yuskavage, Tracy Emin: All are among the younger artists who look to Lucian's analysis of the body just as many Abstract Expressionists once drew on Sigmund's dissection of the mind.

In his new monograph on the artist, "Lucian Freud" (Rizzoli, 488 pages, $135), billed by the publisher as the most comprehensive survey of Lucian to date, William Feaver writes, "There's an easy assumption that, metaphorically speaking if not by actual bequest, Lu the Painter inherited the couch of his renowned grandfather." An easy assumption, yes, but an overworked one. Mr. Feaver, a British art critic and painter who has organized several Freud exhibitions, fortunately knows better than to spend much time on the Sigmund-Lucian comparison. Instead, his book hints at more interesting terrain. Although it is not an argument made explicitly in the book (a somewhat tongue-tied, soft appreciation), Mr. Feaver offers up nearly 400 reproductions, four interviews with the artist, and an introductory essay that suggests a different conclusion: The secret of Lucian's success may not be his Sigmundness. It may instead be his Englishness.

Born to Jewish parents in Berlin in 1922, Lucian escaped with his family to England in 1933. He did not look back. He never dilated on the Jewish identity that first sent him abroad — "Being Jewish?" Mr. Freud remarked to Leigh Bowery, the corpulent performance artist who became one of his favorite subjects, "I never think about it, yet it's a part of me" — he gave up on Germany — "Hitler's attitude to the Jews persuaded my father to bring us to London, the place I prefer in every way to anywhere I've been" — and, finally, he wanted little to do with Sigmund: "I think [psychoanalysis is] unsuited to the lifespan," he told Mr. Feaver, somewhat elliptically. "I feel very guarded about it but I'm fairly ignorant about it."

What replaced all this was an adopted national canon. Sure, boiling things down to national style may be reductive, but Mr. Freud clearly set about performing that reduction himself. The process began in boarding school, where Lucian worked to rid himself of Teutonic mannerisms. "When I came to England first I could only do German Gothic handwriting," says Mr. Freud. Mr. Feaver continues: "The spikiness lapsed and he developed a rounded, laboured, but not inelegant script of his own, each word treated as a novelty, written as though drawn."

The same transition can be seen through his early artwork. Despite little formal training, Lucian displayed an immense talent for draftsmanship. Although less well known than his paintings, his etchings remain a high point of his oeuvre (a subject that will be examined in an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art starting in December). Ink drawings, such as "Loch Ness from Drumnadrochit" (1943), likewise became crystalline interpretations of the visible world.

Yet his paintings through the 1940s still shout "Weimar." The bug-eyed portraits of the period, though accomplished, betray an expressionist manner. Mr. Feaver writes how this led to the "assumption (he took it as an accusation) that he was a Germanic sort of artist, carrying on willy-nilly in prewar, pre-Hitler, 'Neue Sachlichkeit' style."

Well, up to a point, he was. In the mid-1950s, however, the manner matured. Suddenly we see the signature style, the splotchy red-yellow-green brushwork that he would apply, for the rest of his career, to his analysis of human flesh.

The 19th-century British painter Benjamin Haydon once remarked:

The explanation of the propensity of the English people to portrait painting is to be found in their relish for a Fact. Let a man do the grandest things . . . yet the English people would prefer his portrait to a painting of the great deed.

The likeness they can judge of; his existence is a Fact. But the truth of the picture of his deeds they cannot judge of, for they have no imagination.

If Mr. Freud was not born with English sensibility, he developed one in paint. And he found ready success in the "honesty" of these fleshy facts. It comes as no surprise that one of Mr. Feaver's interviews with Mr. Freud concerns Lucian's appreciation of John Constable. This interest began when Mr. Freud was "living in Dedham, in the Constable country. I'd seen the little painting of the tree trunk, close-up, in the V&A, and I thought what a good idea." Mr. Freud continues: "I mean, this is so English isn't it?"

But of course, beyond the interest in fact, Mr. Freud's most famous paintings are English for more tabloid reasons, too. Oscar Wilde once said, "The English public, as a mass, takes no interest in a work of art until it is told that the work in question is immoral." As is underscored by Mr. Feaver's book, Mr. Freud's shortcoming is that he can abandon English fact for mere English sensationalism.

In 1964, Mr. Freud was dismissed from a teaching job for assigning his students to paint naked self-portraits that would be "something really shameless, you know." Thereafter, the subject in his own work became evermore shameless and grotesque. Enter Leigh Bowery and "Big Sue," Mr. Freud's obese painter's models. Enter taboo. For one painting he positioned his half-naked, pre-pubescent daughter Isobel on the floor beside a houseplant ("Large Interior, Paddington," 1968-69). He also featured a man, the photographer David Dawson, breastfeeding a baby as Francis Wyndham reads Flaubert's letters ("Large Interior, Notting Hill," 1998).

The slow rise of British art, which tracked the demise of the New York School and the dying influence of the French avant-garde, has privileged Mr. Freud as the embodiment of English style. Unfortunately, he inhabits the best and worst attributes of what England can offer up in paint. His champions point to John Constable. But Mr. Freud is rather more Dorian Gray.