An Interview with Jhumpa Lahiri

The novel moves between Calcutta and New England-Rhode Island, specifically, where you grew up. Calcutta has been a backdrop for much of your fiction in the past, as has New England. What's it like to describe your childhood home?
When I think of the case of Rhode Island, it's interesting, this time around, because I feel as though I've written about Rhode Island in a kind of disguised way previously. I've overtly set some of my books and stories in Massachusetts, which is a place I also know and I've lived in, but I never really referred to Rhode Island specifically, I believe, until this book. And I don't know why. Maybe I felt awkward about naming the place where I grew up feeling, I don't know, strange about it in some way. Massachusetts provided a convenient shield for a while. I set "The Namesake" outside Boston, for example, and even some of the stories in the first book, "Interpreter of Maladies," while I picture them in my head in Rhode Island, I don't say that they are, so the setting could be Connecticut, it could be Massachusetts, it could be Rhode Island. But this is the first novel where I really felt that I wanted to write about Rhode Island. I wrote a piece some years ago for an anthology called "State by State" that was edited by Sean Wilsey and Matt Weiland. I think it was at a point where I was just beginning to get into the writing of "The Lowland." Having written that essay, having confronted for the first time this fact of my life that I had been raised in Rhode Island, a place I never really knew, an experience I never fully came to terms with in some ways-helped me, and I thought, O.K., I would like to set this book in Rhode Island, consciously, and name it as such. So I did, and I think that it liberated me in some way to really think about it and write about it and remember it in a fuller way.
The physical landscape the coastline of the state, in particular is important for Subhash. Did you start looking at Rhode Island and thinking about it with Subhash's perspective in mind?
I did, in fact. I started driving to the campus where he would have studied, where he had studied. I would drive out there, I would pretend I was him. I would walk along the little beach. I would look at what he would see. Part of getting to know his character was, on my visits to Rhode Island, thinking about what his day-to-day life would have been like. The church, for example, near the beach, really struck me, and I thought, well, this is something he would see.
In "The Lowland" there are times when your writing is quite different than it's been in the past. The sentences are sometimes shorter and more clipped you use more sentence fragments, for example, than you've done previously and there's a greater sense of urgency in the voice. Was this something that you were aware of as you were writing?
I think a little bit. I had wanted to write in a slightly different way with this book. I didn't want the book to feel heavy, because I felt that the book was heavy I mean that the story was heavy, the material was heavy, the situation, the circumstances, and all of this was very weighty. And I didn't want the writing to feel heavy. I just wanted to say what I needed to say in the sparest way that I could. I wanted to have some sort of lightness. So I was trying to pare back even more than I normally try. The earlier drafts did feel heavier and clunkier and not satisfying, because I just felt there was so much information, there was so much history, the emotions of the book everything that was going on. It just felt much burdened and I wanted to free the book up in some way.
The excerpt we published in the Summer Fiction Issue ends when Subhash asks Gauri, who is pregnant with Udayan's child, if she'll move to Rhode Island with him. Anything could happen in America, and one scenario is that Gauri and Subhash could find some kind of happiness together. How conscious were you of that possibility and did you always know that the reality would be far more complicated?
I always knew. I mean, I always knew, even as they were cooking up this solution that felt urgent to them at the time, that it would be in some sense a mistake, but at the same time not a mistake. It was something that felt necessary, but something that wouldn't necessarily solve the problem. And I think a lot of life looks this way, where you do something, and you know that it's not quite the best thing to do but you do it anyway because there is something about it that feels necessary in the moment. So I was working with that, but it never interested me to give them a happy ending.
Did you know how their married life would play out in Rhode Island, or was that something you understood as you were writing?
Not exactly. I knew they would have the childthat the child would be born. I didn't know exactly how that would affect them both. I think the sharp divide that Gauri and Subhash feel toward the child took me some time to understand. Who would feel what and how? One way the plot could have gone was, well, Gauri has the baby and she's enamored of the child because it's the child of her lost husband, whom she loves, and the child is fulfilling to her, and Subhash is shunted to the side, or whatever. That could have been one of the ways, right? But as I started working with what happened once the child was born, I was just trying to follow them, and so then I went in another direction.
Are you writing stories in Italian, too?
Well, I wrote one thing that I would call a story with a beginning and a middle and an end, and then I've written a bunch of four-, five-page descriptions of a character or a moment.
Does it feel as though the characters change in any way when you think about them in Italian. Or are they the same people, with the same motivations?
That's what so wild about it. I showed the one story I wrote to some of my Italian friends, who've read me in English, and they all said the same thing, which is you sound like a different writer in a way. All I know is that I wrote the story-and it's a very strange, odd story that I know I would never have written in English. And that's what I find so exciting about it. It's just discovering this whole other room. I don't know if you ever have this dream-I think it's a classic dreamthat you have a house and suddenly there's that other room behind the kitchen. You have twenty-five more square feet in your life, you know, and it's sort of the equivalent of that dream, but it's come true, because now I do have access to that room and it's amazing. It's like turning my back on the language that I've known and counted on and expressed myself in all my life, to suddenly have this other space, and I do feel that the things I write sound different. .
Can you imagine doing the kind of research trips you did to Calcutta or Rhode Island for the novel, and making your notes in Italian?
Would I write in Italian if I went to Calcutta? I don't think I would. The strange thing is, I've been back in America now for a month. I'd filled up my notebook in Rome, and I ran out and bought a new notebook before I left for the U.S., and I thought, O.K., I'm going to continue this, I'm going to write at least a few sentences in Italian every day. But I haven't written a single sentence. And I know that when I return to Rome it will come back, but I just feel that I can't access it here, and it's been a very weird source of frustration, because right now I feel that I'm in love with this language and immersed in it, and willingly, consciously in a state of linguistic exile, and part of the reason this ended up happening and I started spontaneously writing in Italian is that I have really not read anything in English for over a year, and I think for me, because writing has always been an almost instinctive response to the act of reading, it's inevitable. I've been reading and reading and reading and reading in Italian, and so the reading of it is going into my brain, and I'm thinking about it, and I'm reading the sentences and absorbing this new language, new vocabulary, new rhythms, new ways of saying things, and given how much I'm devoted to reading in Italian, I feel that writing in English would be completely schizophrenic and unsatisfying

This interview has been edited for clarity and length. It was previously published in  The New Yorker.