Here again, an event of some importance that could be used to round the characters, provide insight into the relationship, indicate change or motive, Gogol and Moushumi go out to dinner for their first anniversary.
They’ve both dressed up for the occasion–when she emerges from the bathroom she sees that he is wearing the shirt she’s given him, moss-colored with a velvet Nehru collar of slightly darker green. It was only after the salesman had wrapped it that she’d remembered the rule about giving paper on the first anniversary. She considered saving the shirt for Christmas, going to Rizzoli and buying him an architecture book instead. But there hasn’t been the time. She is wearing the black dress she’d worn the first time he’d come to dinner, the first time they’d slept together, and over it, a lilac pashmina shawl, Nikhil’s anniversary present to her. She still remembers their very first date, liking the slightly untamed look of his hair as he’d approached her at the bar, the dark pine stubble on his cheeks, the shirt he’d worn with green stripes and thinner stripes of lavender, the collar beginning to fray. (p. 247)
Lahiri’s attention to detail of surroundings, clothing, meals, for me, is just filling up space. It’s like she was asked to fulfill a word count rather then establish setting, provide grounding, or set mood.
Another thing I’ve noticed is that there is no poetry to her writing. Her use of simile is limited and metaphor is near non-existent (“dark pine (?) stubble”). That’s fine, I suppose, but the flat out description of the material world of this novel would certainly benefit from a bit of lyricism. The whole event seems to unfold in this manner, a series of things–shoes in a window, quail bones on his plate, what the waiters are wearing, how many people in the restaurant, should, but don’t seem to define her slowly developing bad feeling in a way that would be better served by actual conversation between the couple perhaps. As a matter of fact, Gogol seems to be in her peripheral vision this evening. I was also expecting this discomfort of Moushumi’s to be trying to tell me something, maybe that she’s pregnant, rather than merely still dissatisfaction with her life. And here again, I have little sympathy for someone who has all the advantages she has had and still is “unhappy.”
This was the kicker to the clothing detail Lahiri loves, when the next day as Moushumi is entering the university campus to teach a class she is upset by an ambulance and a body being wheeled out.
A number of onlookers cry out in alarm. Moushumi’s hand goes to her mouth. Half the crowd is looking down, away, shaking their heads. From the splayed feet at one end of the stretcher, wearing a pair of beige flat-heeled shoes, she can tell it’s a woman. (p. 255)
Ah yes, but what size shoe?
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology