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2 July 1999 Vol. III, No. 1 Feature Article Success is no short story Dedication paying dividends for young fiction writer By Eric McHenry Although she is one of 20 writers recently deemed "The Future of American Fiction" by The New Yorker, Jhumpa Lahiri is as much an eminence as an imminence. She has arrived. There are two photos of Lahiri (GRS'93, UNI'95,'97) in the magazine's July 21 and 28 double issue. One is a casual color shot, in which she stands at the center of a group of young authors assembled on what appears to be a spinning merry-go-round; they grin widely as the world whizzes by behind them. The other is an elegant black-and-white head shot accompanying a two-column advertisement for Lahiri's debut collection of short fiction, Interpreter of Maladies, published in June by Houghton Mifflin. The issue also contains one of Lahiri's stories. Entitled "The Third and Final Continent," it is, as it happens, the third and final story from her book to appear in the magazine. And The New Yorker's editors aren't the only members of the literary community to have taken note of Lahiri's talent. The collection's title story, first published in the BU-sponsored literary journal AGNI, will be reprinted this year in the prestigious O. Henry and Best American Short Stories anthologies. Enthusiastic reviews of the book have appeared in Kirkus Reviews, Publishers Weekly, and the Boston Phoenix, to name a few of the early ones. Novelist Amy Tan calls Lahiri "one of the finest short story writers I've read." "Everything's happened so quickly," says Lahiri, who holds master's degrees in both English literature and creative writing from BU, as well as an interdisciplinary Ph.D. from UNI. "I can't tell you how thrilling it's been." "She had a wonderful year," adds Leslie Epstein, director of the graduate Creative Writing Program, "and no one is more deserving. The thing that I admire most about Jhumpa is her dedication. She finished the Creative Writing Program several years ago, and she's never stopped working on her stories. We've remained in touch, and every year or so I've gotten a new story from her or seen one in a magazine. She's just worked and worked and gotten better and better, and now it's all coming together." Jhumpa Lahiri Lahiri was born in London and grew up in Providence. Throughout her childhood and young adulthood, however, she made frequent and lengthy visits to India, where most of her extended family lives. Although her stories are not conspicuously autobiographical, they are full of characters who, like Lahiri, find themselves at cultural intersections. Some stories are set in the United States and involve interactions between people of Indian and European descent. Others unfold in India, and concern the introduction of Western or Westernized characters to the culture. In the title story, for example, an Indian tour guide takes an American family of Indian descent to an ancient temple. At various times, the guide and the young mother are left alone. Each perceives something exotic in the other, and as their exchanges become more intimate, they develop equally elaborate though radically different fantasies about each other. In his, the two of them begin a letter correspondence, and ultimately abandon their passionless marriages to be together. In her fantasy, he is an almost-clairvoyant "interpreter of maladies" -- one who will be able to understand as no one else can the sadness she feels, and to suggest a remedy. "While I never lived in India," Lahiri says, "I have a very strong connection to the country -- in particular, to Calcutta. It's very much influenced who I am and the writing that I do. I always wrote a lot in India, because I was often idle. We'd go for long stretches of time, and I never went to school when I was there. My cousins would be involved in their lives, but I was in a sort of strange parenthesis from my own life, and I'd write a lot to fill up some of that time and anchor myself." Lahiri attended Barnard College in New York City, where she studied literature and began thinking about an academic career. Her interest in devoting herself wholly to creative writing began to emerge during her years of graduate study at BU. "I will always think of my years in Boston as the time I became a writer," she says. "I would never be where I am now if it hadn't been for Leslie and the Creative Writing Program. For the first time in my life, I felt acknowledgment for what I was doing. For a writer it means so much to have someone encouraging you and challenging you. Without that, it's easy to think of writing as something you do all by yourself in your room and that nobody cares about it." As she was completing her Ph.D. in 1997, Lahiri learned that she had been awarded a coveted fellowship for residency at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Each year, over 1,000 aspiring writers and visual artists apply for the 20 fellowships, which provide living accommodations, work space, and a modest stipend for a period of seven months, during which fellows are expected to do nothing but create. And that's precisely what Lahiri did, using her residency to add three substantial short stories to her collection. Not that her time in Provincetown was without potential distractions. News of the fellowship was the first in a rapid succession of significant developments in her writing career. "I feel like some sort of poster child for the Fine Arts Work Center," Lahiri says. "I got there in October of '97. In November I got an agent. By December, she was submitting my manuscript and getting positive feedback. I went home for the holidays, and as soon as I got back to Provincetown, I found out about the book deal. And by the end of January I found out about The New Yorker. It was a lot of excitement concentrated in those few months." Jhumpa Lahiri will read from Interpreter of Maladies at 7 p.m. July 7 at Brookline Booksmith, 279 Harvard Ave., Brookline.