i'm a very very complex person

Finished Interpreter of Maladies this morning. It was very good, but not as earth-shatteringly excellent as I had expected it to be. On the surface, it looked like it could have become my new favorite book. After all, it's a collection of short stories and I ordinarily really love reading short stories. Also, it's by an Indian author and I have developed quite an Indian fiction fetish in the past couple years... On top of all that it won the Pulitzer prize and received extremely favorable reviews from quite a few sources that I really trust. What with all of that, I expected to find myself raving about the book. Of course, this is probably all just meant to be a lesson to me about the dangers of high expectations and setting myself up to be disappointed...

I don't want to make it sound like the book was bad, since it certainly wasn't. Jhumpa Lahiri is a very competent, good writer, and Interpreter of Maladies is an extremely impressive debut. The first story in the book is an absolute work of genius, gorgeous and heartbreaking. Unfortunately, the other stories don't quite deliver the same emotional impact as that one, but they are all interesting and her prose is beautiful. Every once in a while her characters seem to cross the line into caricature, but for the most part she has a good feel for people and also writes believable dialogue. Nonetheless, the stories (with the exception of the first one) fail to make the leap from good to great. I think the reason for that is that Lahiri chickens out a little bit. She doesn't take the kind of creative risks that you need to be willing to take in order to write something truly great. While I was reading most of the stories in this book, I didn't get the feeling that she was really laying herself on the line to create something that stood out from the ordinary. Most of the stories seemed like the work of someone who has done an extremely good job of closely and carefully following a recipe--the meal is delicious, but it's not the work of a master chef. Lahiri's stories are like that; they're very well-crafted and lovely, but lack a certain spark of originality. Even so, that first story is good enough to indicate that she's worth watching.