''Not everybody has a telephone,'' she explains. Sen misses in America is the close sense of community she knew in India. Sen has brought me,'' she complains, ''I cannot sometimes sleep in so much silence.'' Another faculty wife, who has taken a baby-sitting job to fill her empty afternoons, tells her young charge that everything she cares about remains in India in the home she left behind. One couple living near a small New England campus ''used to trail their fingers, at the start of each new semester, through the columns of the university directory, circling surnames familiar to their part of the world'' in search of new friends. Lahiri's people are Indian immigrants trying to adjust to a new life in the United States, and their cultural displacement is a kind of index of a more existential sense of dislocation. Lahiri's prose is so eloquent and assured that the reader easily forgets that ''Interpreter of Maladies'' is a young writer's first book. In this accomplished collection of stories, Jhumpa Lahiri traces the lives of people on two continents - North America and India - and in doing so announces herself as a wonderfully distinctive new voice.
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