Eloquent New Writers

by Professor Katrina Roberts, English

How I’d love simply to list the many books that have moved me these last several months. Instead, and with an eye on the sweeping hand before I sit down with pieces to read from my students, I offer here three books in particular that have taken my breath, urged me onward across pages, and left me — though satisfied by closure in each — hungry for more by these three voices:

* Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri (Houghton Mifflin Company, 1999). You’ve surely already read this national bestseller, winner of the Pulitzer Prize; if not, I’d urge you to. These stories are well worth rereading and will find a place in anthologies for years to come. I had encountered Lahiri’s voice in the New Yorker and elsewhere in journals where many of the stories were first published. Born in London but raised in Rhode Island, Lahiri offers, in this first collection, stories set both in India and the United States, stories that indeed live up to the glowing words already bestowed upon them: “eloquent,” “delicate,” and “assured,” among many.
With breathtaking formal grace and emotional acuity, the writer transports us into the midst of lives complicated by cultural barriers and unhappy relationships; though mostly of Indian heritage, in story after story (many with sophisticated plots) the characters confront questions that resonate universally — what it means to be foreign even to oneself, what it means to be human. Quiet yet astonishing, these stories make me feel new to myself. Lahiri’s publicist told me back in September that the writer is hard at work on a novel; I’d feel safe in recommending it in advance.

* The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint: A Novel by Brady Udall (Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc., 2001). Colleague Dale Cosper loaned me this first novel by the short story writer Brady Udall, whom William Kitt-redge has called “one of the very best” of “a new generation of writers . . . emerging in the West.” I was reminded quickly of John Irving’s plots and wonderful, quirky characters in this novel, which begins in the seven-year-old voice of Edgar Mint, the half-Apache, half-white narrator whose life is one long series of accidents. Udall successfully flips between a first and third person narrative, often within the same paragraph, accentuating perhaps how interior and exterior lives are lived simultaneously. Udall’s work has invited comparison to Dickens and Kesey, among others, though in content and composition the novel finally is an entirely inventive tour de force that, in scene after tactile scene, marries dark humor with heart-breaking revelation. Edgar’s deter-mination in the face of tragedy, and the disturbing love of characters he encounters along his trail, remind this reader that even in a cruel world there can be redemption. Udall’s work is wise and funny and thoroughly engaging.

* Increase by Lia Purpura (University of Georgia Press, 2000), winner of the Associated Writing Programs Award for Creative Nonfiction, is a beautifully crafted work — not only a chronicle of pregnancy, birth, and the first year of her son’s life, but a poet’s account of how her already heightened vision is intensified, challenged, and transformed by the journey into motherhood. I shared Increase with my advanced creative writing class in the fall of 2001, during which Purpura came to speak as a guest in the Visiting Writers Reading Series. The book is a meditation on time and the self, how we navigate and shape both, while inhabiting a complex world. These are lyric essays that illuminate that wonderful blur between prose and song. Purpura’s Stone Sky Lifting, a slim, elegant volume of poems with a metaphysical vision, also is terrific; in it, Purpura recognizes how we learn about the inner world from looking outward, how we might identify the spiritual through ongo-ing attentiveness to the abundance around us. Purpura has also translated Poems of Grzegorz Musial.
Indeed in her prose and her poetry, Purpura shines as an empathetic translator of individual experience into enacted revelation; I feel I find in Purpura’s books words for things I hadn’t yet known I, too, wanted to say.

Katrina Roberts, Assistant Professor of English--Creative Writing