The Decade's Best Dialogue
Anyone who has taken a beginning fiction workshop knows that dialogue does not come naturally to many writers. It's tricky, developing nuanced voices for characters, and plenty of authors fail. The task is made even more difficult if the writer is interested in the collision of cultures and generations, as Jhumpa Lahiri is in her first short story collection "Interpreter of Maladies."
All of the stories published here deal in myriad forms with displacement and assimiliation, whether of immigrants, the elderly or the lonely, in India or America, and Lahiri relies heavily on dialogue to establish how out-of-place or absurd her characters feel. A young married couple wounds each other with words uttered in a darkened kitchen, a grandmother transplanted from her native New Delhi cannot understand — or make herself understood to — her American-born grandchildren, a child's definition of the word "sexy" reveals to a young woman the emptiness of her relationship with a married man.
Lahiri is subtle (and thrifty — nothing her characters say is superfluous) in the dialogue she writes, and there is nothing jarring in the words spoken by any of the characters in these stories. In "The Third and Final Continent," a brief exchange that marks the meeting between a young Indian graduate student and a genteel 100-year-old lady shows off Lahiri's abilities to use dialogue to establish both her characters' traits and the relationship between them:
"You're punctual!" the woman proclaimed. "I expect you shall be so with the rent!"
"I have a letter, madame." In my jacket pocket was a letter confirming my employment from MIT, which I had brought along to prove that I was indeed from Tech....
"The last boy was always late! Still owes me eight dollars! Harvard boys aren't what they used to be! Only Harvard and Tech boys in this house! How's Tech, boy?"
"It is very well."
You checked the lock?"
Yes, madame."
She slapped the space beside her on the bench with one hand, and told me to sit down. For a moment she was silent. Then she intoned, as if she alone possessed this knowledge: "There is an American flag on the moon!"
"Yes, madame."
It's not much, yet those few lines reveal, and set up, the characters for the rest of the story. The young immigrant settling into a new country, uncertain of how to respond in any other way than politely to an older woman who by her age and social status is removed from much of mainstream society. So artfully used, such dialogue illuminates and makes sense of a story's plot and outcome, adding layers or meaning that might otherwise be missing.
— Jessica Chapel (jnc at flakmag dot com)
