Interpreter of Maladies has a special place in my heart when it comes to Pulitzer Prize winners. That’s because it’s the book that started me on my way to this very project, in which I am reading every book that has won a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
It’s also one of only nine story collections to win this prize, and Jhumpa Lahiri is one of only eleven authors to win a Pulitzer Prize for their debut. It’s one of my favorite books. So I was delighted to reread this book to time this deep dive around the release of Jhumpa Lahiri’s newest story collection, Roman Stories (review here).
The Origin of My Pulitzer Prize Obsession
It all started with Interpreter of Maladies. Flashback to early 2001. I was newly graduated from high school and working at Borders Books in northern New Jersey instead of going to college. Someone (I do not recall who) recommended Interpreter of Maladies to me. It was one of many similar conversations I had with the adults around me at the time, adults always being eager to discuss the future with new high school graduates. Or if they weren’t interested in discussing what I wanted to do with my life (the question terrified me because I didn’t know), they latched onto the fact that I worked in a bookstore and told me all the books they thought I should get to reading immediately.
Most of those recommendations were duly ignored by me, but I did look up some of them to see if I might be interested. Interpreter of Maladies was one of these, and when I plucked a copy from the shelf I noticed a big silver stamp on the cover proclaiming “WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE.” In fact, at that time, Interpreter of Maladies was still the reigning champ as a new winner had not been declared yet.
I was familiar with the Pulitzer Prize then, but had not followed it at all. I read the description on the back of the book and it sounded interesting, but the silver stamp felt like a solid recommendation for some reason. It announced that this was a book worth my time. So I read Interpreter of Maladies. And I loved it.
Within a few weeks, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay was announced as the next winner. I purchased a copy of the paperback when it was released, this time with a golden sticker on the cover. I also loved it.
Not long after that, a friend of my father’s recommended A Good Scent From a Strange Mountain to me, and when I looked it up I was delighted to find that it, too, was a Pulitzer Prize winner.
So you see, within the span of a year I learned to equate the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction with quality. If I saw it advertised on a book’s cover, I felt I could trust that it would be a good book. And because I was still young, and many lessons that burn into your brain at a young age stick with you over time, my association of the Pulitzer Prize with quality books has lasted. Even when I didn’t agree with the choices.
And because I worked in a bookstore, the Pulitzer Prize became something I paid attention to every year. If a book won, I knew people would come in to ask for it. So I started watching for the announcement every year and immediately got on the phone to order some copies of the winning book.
I did begin to pay attention to the Booker Prize for the same reason around this time, but Americans, in my region at least, were a lot pickier about that prize. Life of Pi? Bestseller. Vernon God Little? Not so much. Meanwhile, the Pulitzer selected Empire Falls and Middlesex, two books that were easy to hand-sell to customers (mostly because I genuinely liked them).
It’s likely that as I moved up at the bookstore to take over merchandising of the store, I would have discovered the Pulitzer Prize anyway. But all readers look for reliable metrics for book recommendations. In the days before the internet really took over our lives, and before social media transformed the way we get book recommendations (hello from my BookTube channel!), the Pulitzer Prize stamp was a sign to potential readers. The Oprah logo on a book was the same way.
I learned to look at the Pulitzer Prize-winners in this way because someone recommended Interpreter of Maladies to me and the stamp is what made me trust the recommendation. And when I ended up liking the book myself, I looked for more–and I was not disappointed.
Snapshot: 1999
To begin, let’s take a look at what was happening in the world the year Interpreter of Maladies was published.
In bookstores:
The bestselling books of 1999 are remarkably commercial. John Grisham topped Publishers Weekly‘s list with The Testament, followed by Hannibal by Thomas Harris (a book I despise). Assassins, the sixth book in the Christian Left Behind series, was third, and the novelization of Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace was fourth. Michael Crichton’s Timeline rounded out the top five. So you can see that we’ve come a long way from the literary bestseller lists of other Deep Dives.
Ha Jin won the National Book Award for Fiction with Waiting, which will come up again later. The Nobel Prize for Literature went to Gunter Grass, “whose frolicsome black fables portray the forgotten face of history.” And the Booker Prize went to J.M. Coetzee for Disgrace.
In movies:
Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace dominated the box office, earning a good chunk more than the second-place finisher, The Sixth Sense. Toy Story 2, Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me, and The Matrix rounded out the top five. American Beauty went on to win Best Picture at the Academy Awards celebrating 1999 releases.
In music:
My little sister and many other rabid boy band fans propelled The Backstreet Boys to the top of album sales with Millennium. And as an aside, my older sister and I picked up her pre-ordered copy of Millennium to go on a road trip to see The Phantom Menace a day before it was actually released. I was in high school, what can I say?
In the news:
I tried to explain the Y2K hysteria to my foster son a few years ago and he didn’t understand, so I guess you had to be there. But it was a thing! In other news, the impeachment trial of Bill Clinton began in January. He was acquitted by the Senate in February. In March, Dr. Jack Kevorkian was found guilty of second-degree murder by a Michigan jury, in a case that captured a lot of attention. Another big news story that year came in April, when the Columbine high school shooting took place. Unfortunately, school shootings have only become more common since then. You can find more facts for this year on Wikipedia.
What Is Interpreter of Maladies About?
The most straightforward way to summarize Interpreter of Maladies is to say that it is a story collection that reflects the experiences of immigrants to the United States, particularly ones of Indian heritage. That is the framework of most discussion that centers on this book, which is fair because that’s precisely what it is.
And it’s mostly done in a very subtle, elegant way. Maybe the final story reaches a bit when it draws a thematical link between astronauts landing on the moon and immigrants landing on a new shore, but as the grandson of immigrants who scraped to survive in the United States, I don’t have a problem with it. Especially since my grandfather, who immigrated to the US from Italy, passed away as I was finishing this collection. It really got me in the mind space of how difficult it is to uproot your life, go somewhere where you won’t be able to communicate well, and try to build a new life from scratch. You might as well be landing on the moon!
It’s also about the difficulty of maintaining your traditions in a new land, especially when your children are growing up in a new culture. There’s a sense that the place where you came from is slipping away over time.
But if you look under the surface, there’s actually a lot more going on here.
In rereading these stories, it struck me how many of them are about failures to communicate. The first story, A Temporary Matter, is about a young couple who no longer know how to connect in the wake of a tragedy. When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine is about a man who joins another family every night to watch the news as he waits to hear from his wife and daughters in Pakistan—not knowing if they are alive or dead. The title story finds a woman telling a driver, who also works as a medical interpreter, a secret that has been weighing on her, and which she does not know how to reveal to her husband. A Real Durwan is about a woman who spins unbelievable yarns about her former life, stories that ultimately get her into trouble because no one believes her anymore. And so on.
This is actually a story collection about disconnection. Immigration is a lens it uses to explore that theme. Notice that the brief summaries I gave for those stories (which are only half of this collection) don’t mention immigration at all.
I listened to a recent interview Jhumpa Lahiri gave about her new story collection, Roman Stories, and she discussed how she has frequently stopped naming her characters. The reason is that names can be a tool to create shorthand for who a character is. People will begin making assumptions and othering her characters, so she doesn’t give them the chance anymore. She also talked about how this is something that has happened to her throughout her own life because her own name identifies her as an “outsider” in American and Italian society (if someone chooses to see her that way).
This is important because I think the characters in Interpreter of Maladies are facing the same struggles. Each story has at least one character who is separated from the other characters–whether by class, origin by birth, education, etc. What is an immigrant story if not a story in which an arbitrary designation creates a gulf between two people in the same place? To classify people as immigrants is to create an ‘other.’
And that is the genius of Jhumpa Lahiri: her work has evolved considerably over the years since Interpreter of Maladies was published, yet it all feels connected. It is recognizable as the work of the same person. No matter how much she grows or becomes interested in new things, her work is immediately identifiable and consistent.
Why Did This Win a Pulitzer Prize?
First and foremost, the book is gorgeous. Prize jurors frequently talk about their process, and when they do, they usually ponder whether or not the platform should be used to recognize up-and-coming talent. Certainly, in 1999 there was no guarantee that Jhumpa Lahiri would go on to have the incredible career she has enjoyed, but I think this collection is a textbook announcement of a significant new talent.
Additionally, the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction has had a proud tradition of recognizing immigrant stories. There are subtle immigrant stories like Gone with the Wind, where the story of Scarlet O’Hara’s Irish immigrant father is woven into the larger (more problematic) story. There are stories about immigrant communities like The Able McLaughlins, which centers on Scottish immigrants living the pioneer life. There are stories like His Family, where waves of immigrants transforming neighborhoods are initially a source of anxiety, then a cause for charity. Because many people think of America as a country of immigrants (despite the reality that there were people living here when European colonists arrived), it’s unsurprising that stories about immigrant life pop up so often in Pulitzer Prize books.
But historically, those stories are about white immigrants (usually Irish). Interpreter of Maladies reflects a new type of immigration story because this population had not been seen much in Western literature. I didn’t even know what a salwar kameez was when I first read this book. So Interpreter of Maladies is one of those situations where a book scratches an itch in a cozy way without being “just another” in a long line of similar books. It breaks new ground while feeling familiar.
Is This Book Any Good?
I love it. I included it in my video about the best 25 books of the last 25 years, and it ranked high in my preliminary look at the Pulitzer books I’ve read so far.
Who Is Jhumpa Lahiri?
Jhumpa Lahiri was born in London in 1967. Her name is actually Nilanjana Sudeshna Lahiri. Her parents had immigrated to London from West Bengal. They moved again when Lahiri was three years old to Kingston, Rhode Island. She grew up in America and as such, she considers herself to be an American.
Lahiri’s mother was particularly insistent that her children grow up knowing their Bengali heritage, and this push-and-pull dynamic between the culture where they lived and the culture they were from obviously had a tremendous impact on Lahiri’s career as a novelist. It informs every book she has written to some extent. Even her current writing set in her new home of Italy reflects this dynamic.
Even more significantly, it was Lahiri’s kindergarten teacher who began calling her Jhumpa because it was easier to pronounce than her given names. As I mentioned, Lahiri has talked openly about how her name made her feel embarrassed growing up because she felt that it marked her as an outsider. If you’re familiar with Lahiri’s work, you can probably guess that this is the inspiration behind her first novel, The Namesake. And again, it’s why she moved away from naming her characters in her current works like Whereabouts and Roman Stories.
Jhumpa Lahiri is one of only eleven writers who have won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for their debut. There have only been two more debut winners in the years since: Paul Harding and Viet Thanh Nguyen.
Lahiri’s win also marked only the seventh time a story collection had won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Interpreter of Maladies remains the last true story collection to win the prize (Olive Kitteridge and A Visit From the Goon Squad are linked stories, which is a bit different–although they are, technically speaking, story collections).
The facts in this section are taken from Jhumpa Lahiri’s Wikipedia page.
Are There Adaptations or Sequels?
No. But definite thematic throughlines are running throughout Jhumpa Lahiri’s work.
Is Interpreter of Maladies the Great American Novel?
If you’ve been following along with this project, you know I believe that the Pulitzer Prize is inextricably linked with the quest for the mythic Great American Novel. And that I don’t think it’s possible for any one book to encompass everything about this sweeping, complicated country. The best you can do is create a shortlist of great American fiction. And I believe Interpreter of Maladies belongs on that list.
What Was Jhumpa Lahiri’s Competition for the Pulitzer?
1999 was, for me, actually a hugely competitive year for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. As you can tell, I adore Interpreter of Maladies. But I also adore one of the other finalists from that year: Annie Proulx’s Close Range: Wyoming Stories. For the record, I also like the third book that was in the mix, which was Ha Jin’s Waiting, but I think you could easily narrow it down to Proulx v. Lahiri in that lineup. Winning the National Book Award may have hurt Waiting‘s chances with the Pulitzer anyway.
Should Interpreter of Maladies Have Won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction?
This is incredibly difficult. Why, oh why, did two of my favorite books have to be published the same year? How do I choose between Interpreter of Maladies and Close Range? Could this be a year that ends in a tie–now that the Pulitzer Board has shown that such a thing is possible?
I should try to pick one and not cop out. But I do not want to choose between these books.
I feel like my personal preference might actually lean toward Close Range–after all, when I listed the best books of the last 25 years, Close Range made my top five and Interpreter of Maladies did not. However, I like the way this situation worked out. Annie Proulx already had a Pulitzer Prize at this point, and I don’t think The Namesake would have been as big of a deal if Lahiri hadn’t won instead. The Pulitzer Prize launched Lahiri’s career. I wouldn’t change that.
It’s a photo finish, and if you ask me on another day I might come up with a different answer. But at this moment, I think the Pulitzer Board got it right.
Other Pulitzer Prize Deep Dives
His Family (1918) • Now in November (1935) • Gone With the Wind (1937) • The Grapes of Wrath (1940) • To Kill a Mockingbird (1961) • The Color Purple, Alice Walker (1983) • Lonesome Dove (1986) • Interpreter of Maladies (2000) • March (2006) • Tinkers (2010) • Less (2018) • The Netanyahus (2022) • TIE: Trust and Demon Copperhead (2023) • Night Watch (2024)
Deep Dives On Pulitzer Years With No Winner
Supposedly Fun 