Jhumpa Lahiri is one of my favorite authors.
But even the best make mistakes.
Her latest book Whereabouts made me...so angry.
Not because it's poorly written.
In fact, it's not poorly written at all. I'm not sure if she would know how to write anything that wasn't creatively immaculate.
My issue with it is that it is...tone deaf in one of those astounding ways where you have to wonder how her editor, publisher, or anyone working with her didn't suggest just hiding the entire manuscript in favor of something more appropriate.
As we're starting to see the end of the pandemic, Lahiri has decided that what she wants to tackle is a book written in Italian by her, then translated...by her...all about an author...in Italy...just kind of...walking around...not doing anything.
Certainly not working.
Lahiri taught herself Italian, wrote a book in that language, and then translated it.
And while that is all very impressive, it also smacks of the kind of elite privilege that most very acclaimed authors enjoy after they manage to work their way into the good graces of the academia crowd. Somehow, once you publish something that provides you the opportunity to do speaking tours at Ivy League universities, you get to do things like move to a European country and wander aimlessly through its streets just so you can write a piece for the New Yorker about it a year later. You can ruminate on what it means to be an American in a foreign land.
I swear to god, as much as I love James Baldwin, I really wish authors would stop trying to imitate him by dropping themselves into what they perceive is a Bohemian landscape just so they can write about chain-smoking and affairs with married people and how golly gosh the French and the Italians and everyone who isn't American is just so...not American.
Despite all of us agreeing that Hemingway was not somebody we should try to emulate in any way, the writing community's obsession with being expats has never dwindled, and I understand the allure. If I could get paid to go live in Tuscany and write about how I spent my day trying to dig a well for my villa, I would happily cash that check, but one would hope that at this particular moment in time, that kind of writing could have used a break.
The Eat Pray Love/Under the Tuscan Sun genre has always received its share of mockery, and much of that has, yes, involved a certain level of sexism, but it's also just people with jobs balking at the idea that we should deeply involve ourselves for three hundred or more pages into the life of someone who has no job and probably never will again and should be read solely because they can craft a good sentence and they're smarter than us.
The gap between what the New York Times finds impressive and what the rest of the country desperately needs when it comes to culture widens by the hour. Yet another reason why economic diversity in critical writing needs to be considered in addition to no longer having every critic be a straight white guy. Literary criticism has done better with that over the past few years, but the common denominator is that everyone who reviews a book these days has a townhouse in Manhattan or aspires to, and they've made the assumption that blue-collar or lower-income people don't read anyway, so who cares whether or not the latest novella will resonate with them?
I found Whereabouts to be self-involved, self-important, and utterly worthless, and I feel badly picking on it, because it is not the worst culprit when it comes to this crime, but it's from an author I love, who, in the past, has beautifully communicated the experiences of those who cannot afford an undetermined amount of time learning a romance language in a gorgeous country in between gelato.
That's why this book feels like we lost another one. After artists in any field reach a certain level of fame or notoriety, they lose a bit of touch. That's inevitable, I guess. We can't all be Frances McDormand living in a toolshed in Beverly Hills in between films just to avoid turning into Bette Davis, but can we at least ask editors to ask their clients--
What does this character do for money?
Writer AND playwrights, since I refuse to see one more play post-pandemic about rich people at a lake house sharing family secrets and dealing with grief. I refuse. I refuse, I refuse, I refuse. I have produced those plays. One of them. It was great. I loved it. I don't need seventeen more iterations on it, thank you.
And I do not need a book like Whereabouts.
And I do not know a single person who does.
I suppose an author is allowed to write whatever they want, and I suppose a publisher can publish whatever they want, but I no longer agree to go along silently and pretend that there's something there I'm not seeing. Some deeper meaning or substantive moment that's just going over my head, because I'm not savvy enough to see it.
Getting a book published is immensely difficult, and the number of manuscripts that get passed on are probably in the tens of thousands every year, so when I see something like this make it to the finish line, based solely on the clout of the author, it enrages me.
No more rich-fic, please.
I can dream about being unimaginably wealthy and free of responsibilities on my own.
I don't need that dream translated for me.
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