My how they mature

It's Jhumpa Lahiri weekend here in Princeton, where we're watching the movie of The Namesakeand then here's my old contemporary Liesl Schillinger writing a review or her new book in the Times Book Review. Before diving into the quasi-catty let me say that I like Lahiri, I thought The Interpreter of Maladies was a very solid collection of stories and observations and this movie is good too, though I've not read the book.

But I'd like to take a second to look at the branding of Lahiri. The jacket cover photo of her first book was all babeliciousness, as were other pix of her when she promoted the book.


But now there's a new Lahiri, as seen below. There are, admittedly, nine years intervening between the two pictures, but it looks like 22 have passed, and amongst them 9/11. What we are being told is that she is now a senior, authoritative woman of letters, and Schillinger will surely not disabuse us of this. I dunno, I think she's good but from the description of her new stories she could push herself a little harder. I think of Ang Lee as a natural peer, someone whose early work (Eat Drink Man Woman, The Wedding Banquet, Pushing Hands) meditated thoughtfully on issues of cultural conflict and combination, before he moved on to do good to great work in other genres. I'd like to see more before the claims of seniority are arrogated to her.

But, anyhow, no crime compares with Vikram Seth's failure to give us a sequel to A Suitable Boy.