Jhumpa Lahiri: A serious voice that comes from nowhere

It all looks so easy: winning a Pulitzer Prize with her first book, a collection of short stories; then her debut novel is made into a movie, while her second collection of short stories wins the 2008 Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award; and then her second novel, The Lowland, is shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, which will be decided next week.

Except Jhumpa Lahiri doesn’t make it look easy – because it isn’t. There are no jokes, no surreal frenzies, no one-liners. Her language is plain, careful, measured, at times flat. The dialogue is invariably tense, often formal, as grown children speak to parents who represent a home country, India, that has been replaced by a new one, the US. Her stories are serious and real; lives unfold and fall apart, “because in real life, they do”.

Lahiri is a confirmed realist. She has also spent much of her life until now caught between cultures. She was born in London in 1967 of Bengali parents, and grew up in Rhode Island; the geography of New England's coastline has shaped her work. In ways, so has the writing of Hawthorne and Henry James.

A difficult beginning
She says she found it difficult to begin with: "I had no confidence in my writing." Yet she has been celebrated since her debut book, Interpreter of Maladies, won the Pulitzer Prize in 2000. Her novel The Namesake (2003) was filmed within three years. On its US publication, Unaccustomed Earth bypassed all comers to fill the number-one slot on the New York Times fiction bestseller list: that's impressive for short stories, even more so for an uncontroversial author.

Jhumpa Lahiri is intelligent, astute, informed and genuine. There are no ready answers, although living in Italy has made her far more relaxed, less wary. She has been famous from the beginning of her career. She moved from New York to Rome with her husband and their two young children just over a year ago – “to experience somewhere else” – and is very happy for having done so.

“I had been learning Italian for years. I always loved Latin, but Italian is a living language; I’m writing in it now as well as reading it. It is so interesting delving further into language.”

She is reading Antonio Tabucchi and also loves the work of Giorgio Bassani and quotes from his Saluto a Roma in an epigraph to The Lowland. She could be from anywhere: Spain, Greece, Romania or Brazil – "The Italians always know that I'm not Italian" – and still has the light, youthful voice of a clever, enthusiastic college girl and the accent of an east-coast American.

She is also incredibly beautiful. I want to ask her if that has proved a disadvantage, but it seems crass. Her beauty is serene and calm, at least on the surface, as is her work. The more I think about it, though, the more that unasked question makes sense.

No linguistic fireworks
As a writer her greatest risk is that she takes none. She doesn't attempt linguistic fireworks. Her characters are not crazy. Until The Lowland, there had been little violence. Nor is there any humour, exasperated or otherwise. The most intense emotion in her narratives is reflective anger, never more apparent than in Gauri, the traumatised woman at the centre of The Lowland. Her refusal to forgive Udayan – her dead first husband – for having used her destroys the life of her second husband, Subhash, Udayan's loyal brother, who is determined to help her.

Throughout Lahiri's fiction, characters allow their grievances to fester; they pick over old wounds. So does another unhappy husband, in A Temporary Matter, who, as his wife prepares to leave him, finally shatters the mystery surrounding their dead child.

For Lahiri, the major risk in writing is writing itself: the act of attempting to give shape to “the messy lives which people live”. She makes no secret of the fact that she finds writing extremely difficult, and she is wonderfully honest when describing the effort.

Earlier in her career, Lahiri said she was an American writer. Now she is less certain. Her Bengali background lingers. Her parents had initially left India for London. Then they moved to the US in 1969, when she was two years old.

“American? Indian? I don’t know what these words mean. In Italy, it is all about blood, family, where you come from. I’m asked where I am from. I’m from nowhere, I always was, but now I am happy knowing it,” she says with a wave of her hand.

In moving to Rome, everything appears to have become clearer to her. She seems much happier. “I’m older. Having children has helped. I love Rome. I’m very happy there. I wasn’t in New York.”

Meeting Heaney
Lahiri is very likable. There is a gentle candour about her, and she has reached a point in her life when things make sense. She mentions a celebration of Ovid she was involved in last May, in Rome. "I read a Tabucchi story; Seamus Heaney was also there, reading from his Ovid poems. It was the first time I met him. We had planned on meeting up again here in Dublin, in the fall. How could anyone imagine what was going to happen?" She sighs. She has always seemed older than her years because of an intuitive wisdom.

Throughout her childhood she experienced epic journeys back to Calcutta with her parents. For her, India was never home. She belongs to a generation who are the children of parents who left by choice. Her characters are sophisticated, middle-class academics or ambitious graduate students eager to enter US college life and assimilate.

Jhumpa Lahiri is not an Indian writer precisely because her literary voice is far closer to that of Richard Ford, Alice Munro, Mavis Gallant or Richard Yates. There is also the architectural sweep of Lahiri's stories, which are as closely constructed as the fiction of Henry James. Her approach would appear more suited to the novel than to short fiction, yet she is aware that some reviewers consider her more of a short-story writer: "I don't see the distinction; many writers do both."

Thomas Hardy remains important to her, as does the great William Trevor, possibly her single most defining influence. "This novel, The Lowland, looks closely to Trevor's novel Fools of Fortune – you know, in the way an act of violence determines it. I have been writing this book for 10 years – no, longer, 16 years – since I was told about an execution that took place. It stayed with me, that and the Trevor book."

In that 1983 novel, an act of vengeance, witnessed by a boy, reverberates through the years.

Of all the reasons for reading her work, the central one is that she takes the art of storytelling very seriously. A powerful sense of honour informs the work.

“This new book is strong, in that it is not easy to like. I know this – people who read it told me. The characters are not nice. But then . . . ” she stops and we both say together, “humans aren’t nice.”

The Lowland is real. Its emotional intelligence is extraordinarily persuasive, as is the calm, quietly intense Lahiri. "I write because I love it, because I have to."

The Lowland is published by Bloomsbury