"A Temporary Matter" - Jhumpa Lahiri - Interpreter of Maladies
He didn’t want to have to pretend to be happy.
The notice informed them that it was a temporary matter: for five days their electricity would be cut off for one hour, beginning at eight P.M. A line had gone down in the last snowstorm, and the repairmen were going to take advantage of the milder evenings to set it right.
~ Jhumpa Lahiri, “A Temporary Matter”
It is actually insane to me when writers take a few ordinary people in an ordinary situation and construct a compelling story around them.
That probably sounds stupid but I grew up reading science fiction and fantasy, plus I have been on the internet, and I feel like that has irreversibly pointed my taste toward literature that is WEIRD and LOUD and FUNNY. You’ll notice that Raymond Carver and Alice Munro weren’t on my list of short story collections for this newsletter; that’s not because I don’t love them. I love them very much. They are incredible. But I don’t think I could ever write something like what they write. It’s much easier for me to see myself writing something in the vein of Saunders or Moshfegh or Johnson. And since the purpose of this newsletter is primarily self-improvement I’ve focused it on the books I most want to study.1
Today I’m taking a detour though because a (beautiful & brilliant) friend (who I met on Hinge) recommended Interpreter of Maladies, Jhumpa' Lahiri’s 1999 debut, and I absolutely Love This Book. (Buy it!!) I couldn’t not write about it. Specifically, in this post, I want to talk about the story “A Temporary Matter.”
You can read “A Temporary Matter” online if you have a New Yorker subscription; if you don’t, unfortunately I am about to spoil the heck out of it.
At the beginning of “A Temporary Matter” viewpoint protagonist Shukumar and his wife Shoba are having some marital difficulties following the stillbirth of their first child. They have drifted apart and Shukumar isn’t sure how to bring them back together. They’re avoiding each other in their own house. They have trouble making conversation, falling into long silences instead. And Shukumar is having uncharitable thoughts:
Each day, Shukumar noticed, her beauty, which had once overwhelmed him, seemed to fade. The cosmetics that had seemed superfluous were necessary now, not to improve her but to define her somehow.
So, not great.
Since reading A Swim in a Pond in the Rain I have been thinking about George Saunders’ definition of a story as a series of expectation/resolution moments. Here the question we are asking ourselves is: Will Shukumar and Shoba regain the idyllic relationship they enjoyed before the pregnancy?
Another thing Saunders points out is that a story has to escalate. From this sad awkward opening, Lahiri escalates us into an increasingly hopeful sequence of evening conversations. Each night, with the power shut off for one hour, Shukumar and Shoba share their guiltiest secrets under cover of darkness. This brings them closer together; the fourth night, they even have Good Sex™ for the first time in a long time.
A pattern has been established. Shukumar can’t wait for the fifth night of power shut-offs. But Lahiri doesn’t give us a fifth night of power shut-offs. The power company finishes their work early.2 And it is under the full glare of suburban lighting that the Shukumar/Shoba arc reaches its climactic moment:
“Shouldn’t we keep the lights off?” Shukumar asked. She set her plate aside and clasped her hands on the table. “I want you to see my face when I tell you this,” she said gently.
His heart began to pound. The day she told him she was pregnant, she had used the very same words, saying them in the same gentle way, turning off the basketball game he’d been watching on television. He hadn’t been prepared then. Now he was.
Only he didn’t want her to be pregnant again. He didn’t want to have to pretend to be happy.
“I’ve been looking for an apartment and I’ve found one,” she said, narrowing her eyes on something, it seemed, behind his left shoulder. It was nobody’s fault, she continued. They’d been through enough. She needed some time alone. She had money saved up for a security deposit. The apartment was on Beacon Hill, so she could walk to work. She had signed the lease that night before coming home.
She wouldn’t look at him, but he stared at her. It was obvious that she’d rehearsed the lines. All this time she’d been looking for an apartment, testing the water pressure, asking a realtor if heat and hot water were included in the rent. It sickened Shukumar, knowing that she had spent these past evenings preparing for a life without him. He was relieved and yet he was sickened. This was what she’d been trying to tell him for the past four evenings. This was the point of her game.
When I read this section I seriously felt like somebody had just punched me in the stomach. I had to put the book down and close my eyes for a minute. The story’s structure had suggested, to me, that a positive resolution was coming. I didn’t expect a totally saccharine conclusion—but I thought the hints, the increasingly intimate evening conversations, all pointed toward the couple growing closer together, not further apart. I wanted that for them.
But now I went through the same turmoil that Shukumar did. That, I think, is the magic of this story. Lahiri lures us onto Shukumar’s side. We know he has flaws. We know he’s not the best husband. But we want him to do better. We want things to work out for him. And when the hammer blow comes, we feel it as intensely as he does.
Even in the moment itself, we still get misdirected! We know something big is coming, but Shukumar expects it to be another pregnancy! And he’s horrified by that! (So are we, as a reader, maybe?)
But his horror about a potential pregnancy, of course, means he deserves what comes next. They’re breaking up. All of her strange behavior, her distance, the past few days, weeks, months—it wasn’t innocuous drowning-herself-in-work. It was preparing for the breakup. The impact of that knowledge comes rushing in and breaks over us like a nasty tidal wave of Chicago River water circa 1903.
First we feel—holy shit, they’re breaking up?
Then we feel—okay it makes sense that she wants to break up.
So much in the story buttresses the idea that the breakup is correct. Painful, but correct. Our readerly brain flies back through all the details. We reclassify each story moment—previously filed under “rough patch with hopeful trajectory”—as a sign of impending doom. Our hopeful illusions collapse alongside Shukumar’s.
So that’s the climax. The great reversal that cements this story as an unforgettable piece of literature. But there’s still one more page.
The last page of this story is really beautiful and I’m not going to spoil it. You’ll have to read it yourself.
Thanks for reading!! Not sure whether I’ll post about Lahiri or Moshfegh next week but you can bet your ass I’ll post about something!
I probably haven’t thought this through very well. I don’t think I can resist revisiting Carver’s collection Cathedral at some point.
Haha! It’s speculative fiction after all!