#502 This Blessed House- Jhumpa Lahiri

#502 This Blessed House- Jhumpa Lahiri

Sanjeev “was lonely with an excessively generous income for a single man.” His career is going well and his family has arranged a marriage to a younger woman named Twinkle. Like her name would suggest, she is a free spirit. “It was a quality he did not understand. It made him feel stupid, as if the world contained hidden wonders he could not anticipate, or see,”

They have just moved into their new house and find Christian artifacts all over the house. They are not Christian, but Twinkle is enamored with the trinkets and insists that they not only keep them, but display them openly on their mantel.

“They didn’t bother her, these scattered, unsettled matters. She seemed content with whatever clothes she found at the front of the closet, with whatever magazine was lying around, with whatever song was on the radio—content yet curious.”

She won’t get rid of the paraphernalia and he relents, although when all of his work friends and colleagues come for their housewarming he is terrified of the impression it will make. His guest, it turns out, are so taken with his wife and her stories of hunting down these treasures throughout their new house, that they all as a group go hunting in the attic to find the piece-de-resistance. Sanjeev is the only one not enjoying himself, and he is once again literally left standing alone.

Rating: 9-9-9-9 Total= 36

#409 Fun With Problems- Robert Stone

#409 Fun With Problems- Robert Stone

Hampton was a prison town, Mathews was a public defender. He used to be married but he is a drunk and messed all that up. Now he has settled into an existence of complacency and greyness.

“Matthew’s life had become so solitary he had almost stopped caring what he said, or to whom.”

“His ambitions had faded, and life could be various and perversely satisfying in Hampton.”

While conferring with a client at the prison, he meets a social worker and convinces her to meet him for drinks, although she herself a recovering alcoholic, only drinks juice. Mathews is like the devil on her shoulder and is extremely pushy about getting her to drink again. He is successful, she drinks, and they hook up.

“His life was lonely enough, but he was not shopping for a friend or a comrade in the service of the poor. His attraction to her was sensual, sexual, and mean, which was how he wanted it. Spite had taught his detachment. The trick was to carry indifferent to his own feelings without pity for things."

Her life goes back down the drain, and his stays in that middle purgatory. If he can’t be happy, the next best thing is to make others unhappy as well.

Rating: 7-8-7-7 Total= 29