Mrs. Sen’s by Jhumpa Lahiri, 1999
The magic trick:
A thoroughly lonely story
This story really got to me. It’s very lonely. The characters are lonely, yes. But lots of stories have lonely characters.
There’s something else going on here. The story itself feels lonely too. It’s like, “Hey, I got this giant food-chopping blade on page 3. Maybe something exciting and dramatic could happen with that?” But nothing happens. The story shouts, “Mr. Sen suddenly needs more time at the university. Office hours, he says. Maybe something dramatic is going on there?” But no, that’s not this story either.
Instead, the story moves along slowly, quietly, sadly. Even when something fairly dramatic does happen at the end, it sits silently in its resolution with nothing but more loneliness.
And that’s quite a trick on Lahiri’s part.
The selection:
His mother nibbled Mrs. Sen’s concoctions with eyes cast upward, in search of an opinion. She kept her knees pressed together, the high heels she never removed pressed into the pear-colored carpet. “It’s delicious,” she would conclude, setting down the plate after a bite or two. Eliot knew she didn’t like the tastes; she’d told him so once in the car. He also knew she didn’t eat lunch at work, because the first thing she did when they were back at the beach house was pour herself a glass of wine and eat bread and cheese, sometimes so much of it that she wasn’t hungry for the pizza they normally ordered for dinner. She sat at the table as he ate, drinking more wine and asking how his day was, but eventually she went to the deck to smoke a cigarette, leaving Eliot to wrap up the leftovers.
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