the namedropper

This could be the title of any of her books, or one she should have written. I am currently reading her latest book of short stories, Unaccustomed Earth, and had thought I'd write about my impressions later. But, there is something in the way she writes, and in the way she seems to be using her subject matter that forced me to begin writing just now.

It has been hard for me to determine the dichotomy that exists in her stories, that between the deprecating attitude towards the craze among immigrant parents to push their kids towards dizzy achievements -- perfect SAT scores, admissions to Ivies etc -- and her own irritatingly repetitive casual references to all such stations of snobbery: her characters are Harvard teachers (with BMWs), MIT physicists, Oxford art historians; the families live in uptown areas like Wayland, Peabody, Lexington in Mass. Or they dream of houses on Brattle Street. They are often PhDs from top notch institutions or, in one case, have been gracious enough to bow out of, you guessed it, Harvard.

What is obsessing this lady? Some insecurity deep down that she must now appropriate the institutions of Cambridge, Mass to give some sense to her own pinings? I quote Adelle Waldman from The New Republic:

Accomplished, affluent, and coastal, her characters could have been plucked from The New York Times' wedding announcements. Not, of course, the wedding announcements of old, when the Times focused on the bride and groom's "pedigree" (ancestry, prep schools, club membership), and thus almost exclusively featured WASPs--but the more colorful Times' wedding announcements of today, where alma mater and professional status are the predominant signifiers. ("Dartmouth marries Berkeley, MBA weds Ph.D., Fulbright hitches Rhodes," as David Brooks put it in Bobos in Paradise. "You can almost feel the force of the mingling of SAT scores.") It is this new America that Lahiri so skillfully evokes, the milieu in which brown skin matters exponentially less than a degree from Brown, and Jews and Asians outnumber WASPs.

This is the new America? Where desi and Asian kids are forced by parents to cram and attend Spelling Bees and ace SAT scores and then also participate in twenty other activities so their own dreams of bragging about an Ivy-league education are fulfilled?

At this stage I am not in a mood to be generous enough to say that this is the new America that she "so skillfully evokes." I think she is doing nothing more than pathetically namedropping.