For the first time since I’ve joined the Literary Wives Club, the selection is a short story collection – Jhumpa Lahiri’s Pulitzer Prize winning Interpreter of Maladies.
There are nine stories in the collection, the majority focused on Indian or Bengali immigrants in America. Lahiri writes from different perspectives, not bound by gender or age, and the stories feature details and quirks that make them ‘splendid’* and memorable.
There were some standouts for me – This Blessed House described a young Hindu couple who had just moved into their first home together. They keep finding Christian objects left by the previous owners – posters of Jesus behind doors, crucifixes in the attic, and statues of Mary in the garden. Despite her conservative husband’s objections, Twinkle keeps these objects, displaying them on the mantelpiece. This unusual battle-of-wills is also a gentle demonstration of how people can complement each other in a marriage, and the compromises we make for the happiness of another.
I very much enjoyed Sexy, the story of a young woman, Miranda, who listens to her Indian co-worker bemoan her cousin’s circumstances – her cousin has been left by her husband for a younger woman. What Miranda doesn’t reveal is that she has recently started an affair with a married Bengali man, Dev. This creates an interesting overlapping triad – the mistress, the wife, and the cheater – made all the more compelling when Miranda looks after her co-worker’s nephew for the day. The nephew refers to Miranda’s dress as ‘sexy’ and when she presses him about the meaning of the word he says ‘…loving someone you don’t know…’, which has Miranda reflecting on the validity of her relationship with Dev.
My favourite though, was the opening story, A Temporary Matter, about a couple recovering from the stillbirth of their first child. Since the loss of the baby they had become increasingly distant from each other, but a five-night scheduled interruption to their electricity supply, results in forced discussions by candle light, when they speak openly for the first time in many months. The ending of this story is powerful and unexpected. Without spoilers, I was reminded of something I read in David Kessler’s text on grieving, Finding Meaning, where he states that when it comes to child loss, marriages suffer not because of the death of the child, but because of how the parents judge each other for not sharing the same feelings they have, and not expressing them in the same way. When two people assume they know everything about the other person, discovering something quite different can be shocking. A Temporary Matter is a perfect fictional account of all that Kessler is saying.
The main question we ask about the books we read for Literary Wives is: What does this book say about wives or about the experience of being a wife?
Many of the stories in this collection feature wives, and each finds herself in different circumstances – some are lonely, some are silenced by their isolation, some do what they want, some demand more from their lives (other than the expected role of wife).
I was most interested in the theme of cultural expectation, and how for some women that provided safety and for others, the opposite.
This was beautifully done in Mrs Sen’s, about an eleven-year old boy who is babysat each afternoon by Mrs Sen, a Bengali woman living in a university town where her husband is a mathematics professor. Mrs Sen is incredibly isolated and desperately misses her family in Calcutta. Despite her husband’s efforts, Mrs Sen refuses to learn to drive, and how this impacts her day is central to the story. Initially Mrs Sen’s focus on managing the home and cooking elaborate curries is a point of pride, however, as her husband assimilates to American life and his expectations shift, Mrs Sen is left behind.
See Rebecca’s, Kay’s, Becky’s and Marianne’s reviews, too. And if you want to join in, our next book (September 2026) is Family Family by Laurie Frankel.
3.5/5
Miranda pictured the two of them in a restaurant in the South End that they had been to, where Dev had ordered foie gras and a soup made with champagne and raspberries…
*if you’ve read this book, you might recall the story where the response, ‘splendid’, was required to particular questions.