You didn’t impugn her artistry, just lobbed a few cliches about her writing that amount to an opinion. Not very convincing criticism. Although the stuff about jealousy was insightful, yes, I do believe there is some of that.

If the choice was mine I believe it would have been more honest (and effective) for Budhos to highlight an unveiled, normal teenage girl on the cover, or perhaps instead of the black veil, a red-white-and blue one. In this book the overzealous, antagonistic powers seem not necessarily Islamic, but American.

i don’t think that’s true for the fairly well established authors who do get to vet their cover art. unless of course the author is happy to leave those details to the publisher. but they always get to see it and can voice their objections/approval.

As for Lahiri, it’s her artistry I impugn, not her accuracy. I’m sure she’s painfully accurate.

Al-Jibraiq, I agree with your assessment of Lahiri. As a person of the literati, it’s problematic that Lahiri is the poster child for South Asian Americans, when she doesn’t represent the second generation accurately.

Not that either is too far off the mark. She is lovable for all sorts of reasons: she’s a good writer, and she’s a good-looking writer, and who better to fly the flag for Desi-stan? She writes tightly controlled plots, she’s respectful, and she puts up with the shit no-nothings like us dish out all over the internet.

On the other hand, I understand the hate-fest too. Jhumpa is not just Jhumpa. She’s the beneficiary of two peculiar public desires. One is the tendency in America (and elsewhere) to celebrate the good as if it were the great. A Pulitzer for that Interpreter book? No way. Her prose, as has been remarked before, is mechanical, engineered to within an inch of its microprecise life. She’s the straight-A MFA student: she never met an adjective she didn’t like, and her books read as if a creative writing teacher would love them. To get a sense of how good she isn’t, read her after reading Philip Roth or Alice Munro. Or Rohinton Mistry for that matter, a wonderfully authoritative and expansive writer with genuine insight into the human experience.

The second reason the haters go at Jhumpa is that she’s been crowned the Brown for Now. So, you could just call it jealousy (some of it is), but there is the very real issue of whether all that hype is better at serving mainstream interests than it is desi interests. Of course, this is a reflection of the industry itself, in which everything is stage-managed and handed to you on a plate. But if you talk to those in the know, you’ll realize that there are Indian writers in English who kick Jhumpa’s (ahem…very attractive) booty, but who don’t get 5% of the recognition, and I think this rubs lovers of literature the wrong way, and that’s why they hate on the J-girl. I mean, come on, Chatterjee’s “English, August” should have won the Booker, the Pulitzer and the Prix Goncourt all at once. But you just try even finding it at Barnes and Noble. Total disgrace.

And then there’s all the impressive non-fiction narratives coming out of India and Desi-stan, a body of writing which, in my opinion, is the great brown contribution to contemporary literature: Pankaj Mishra, Suketu Mehta, Amitav Ghosh, Amitava Kumar, Amartya Sen. A truly stunning wave of cultural production. But the hype merchants are only looking for the next Arundati Roy.