Assimilation

The criticism of American culture from which Jhumpa Lahiri took her collection of short stories, The Interpreter of Maladies, can be summarized by one line describing an American traveler in the homeland of her Bengali ancestors:

"Mrs. Das gave an impatient sigh, as if she had been traveling her whole life without pause."

Such is the cancer that riddles the western world, always moving, but going nowhere. The climate of the story is one of agitation, within the Das family and toward it. The American hallmark of disconnect to other humans and nature are particularly irritating to Lahiri. The same themes are found in her work, The Namesake, in which she shows the beauty in arranged marriages, respect for family and tradition, the harmful effects of western culture. Lahiri tends to write of American culture in an abrasive, almost ugly way, as if the force of assimilation to it is so overwhelming that when drowned in it there is nothing left. This disenfranchisement, the sense of loss, is what propels the motion of unconsciousness described in the quote above.