Pulitzer Project: Interpreter of Maladies

After I finished The Hours the Younger Daughter decided to read it, too, before returning it to the library. After all, the book was pretty light weight, both in size and content. I breezed through it quickly. So did she. And then she asked the usual question: What makes a work of fiction good enough to merit a Pulitzer? By then I had started reading Interpreter of Maladies so I had two recent examples to think about. So what does make a work of fiction Pulitzer worthy? I have no clue. Some past winners have been total dreck, literally unreadable, and others were amazing: beautifully written, a joy to read.

As for the most recent, it falls somewhere into the middle of the pack. Not bad, not great, just quietly announcing, yes, these are typical New Yorker short stories. Not great literature, not bad, just sort of there. The author is Indian American, sort of. According to Wikipedia, Lahiri was born in England and came to the United States at the age of 3 when her father was hired to work at a university library in Rhode Island. 

Her parents were Bengali and placed a lot of emphasis on remembering Bengali culture. The family made frequent trips to India and no doubt provided much of the material Lahiri drew on for her fiction. Her work is described as "autobiographical" but it's a bit of a stretch to call fiction autobiographical when the work is set years, even decades, before Lahiri was born. She may be channeling her parents' and other relatives' stories, but she didn't live any of it herself. 

The book is a collection of short stories, some longer than others. "Interpreter of Maladies" might be the longest. It's an odd narrative about a man who has two jobs: he works as an interpreter for a medical doctor translating patients' descriptions of symptoms and relaying the doctor's advice to the patients. India is a land of many languages and dialects, and the doctor has a sizable number of patients who speak a language the doctor doesn't know. The man's other job is as a tour guide, and it is through his conversations with American tourists that we learn about him being an interpreter of maladies. This is the story that won a prize from The New Yorker and again I'm not sure why. Maybe for being the penultimate New Yorker type of story? Exotic setting, intriguing cultural references, a faint hint of erotica in the tour guide's extremely G-rated thoughts about the female American tourist. Totally typical New Yorker, absolutely nothing out of the ordinary for that magazine other than the story being set in India instead of on a Caribbean island. 

The other stories in the book vary in setting and protagonists. Some are set in India, some in the U.S. One of the oddest stories for me involved a young married couple who moved into a new (to them) house and kept finding Christian tchotchkes: a snow globe with a Nativity scene, a garish poster, and even a large concrete Our Lady of Perpetual Cleanliness hiding in a clump of bushes in the yard -- why Mary wasn't in the usual old bathtub is a mystery. The house is apparently salted with tacky religious memorabilia. They keep finding stuff in odd places: tucked behind a radiator, for example. The wife is fascinated and wants to keep it all; her husband keeps reminding her that they're Hindu. I found myself thinking several kind of related thoughts: the tchotchkes collection is a guaranteed way to get nailed for the sin of cultural appropriation (something that no one was thinking much about back in the 1990s), non-Christians do get a little weird about religious memorabilia and holidays (lots of people celebrate Christmas or Easter with zero thought about the religious meaning of the holidays), and is it wrong of me to want a large statue of Ganesha for my garden? I have an old bathtub I could put him in. 

So how is the book in general? Well, it's competently written, i.e., it's definitely readable. Lahiri can write, which is good considering that her academic career seems to have consisted of teaching other people how to write. Would I recommend it to other readers? Yes. I mean, it doesn't suck. Or, to damn with truly faint praise, I've read worse. It's another middle of the pack book. Not great, not bad, just sort of there. 

Next up on the list? Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. The Garland County Public Library on-line catalog says they have a copy on the shelves so I may get it read in the next week or so. Assuming, of course, that the library does have it. Here's hoping they do because this is one book I'm actually looking forward to reading. I liked Chabon's The Yiddish Policemen's Union: A Novel. I also know he was the head writer for Star Trek: Picard, but I'm not sure if that's a positive or not. In any case, after ignoring the Pulitzers for two years, I may cross three off the list in one month.