So I’m risking a lot with this post – they might kick me out of the “pretending to be a literary snob” club – but I just read Ian McEwan’s Amsterdam (winner of the Booker Prize, England’s top literary award) and I have just one question.

Was it a down year for novels? Because I can’t, for the life of me, figure out how this is award-worthy.

It’s funny. I typically, without fail, love award winning books. If you look at my ten favorite books of the past ten years, five Pulitzers are accounted for (Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead, Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies, and John Updike’s Rabbit Angstrom [which accounts for two: Rabbit is Rich and Rabbit at Rest]).

And that’s not even putting another favorite – The Grapes of Wrath – in the top ten.

But Amsterdam fell flat for me. Really flat. Though, because I’m a novice book reviewer and self-taught critic, I have trouble expressing what exactly it was that I found so…well…

Meh.

Amsterdam is a nice novel. It’s well written. It’s at times haughty, at times funny. It’s everything you’d want in a quick summer read, I guess – intrigue, death, sex, newspapers and grand orchestras. Maybe not so much of those last two, but a lot of the first three.

The story is simple – one woman dies, three ex-lovers meet, two of the ex-lovers plot revenge against the third. The two are a newspaper editor and a composer, the third is an aspiring Prime Minister.

The newspaper person gets some naughty pictures of the aspiring Prime Minister. The composer isn’t sure it’s such a good idea. Hilarity ensues.

Except that’s not what happens. No hilarity ensues – in fact, all we get is a desperate attempt by the newspaper person to slander the aspiring Prime Minister, while (despite a distracting and seemingly unrelated interruption) the composer continues to compose.

It’s a morality tale, or so I’m told. I just read it because it seemed quick, and because I absolutely adored McEwan’s Atonement – another great novel I’ve read in the past ten years. And, upon finishing it, when I had finally figured out how silly and contrived the ending of the book was, I put the book down and just sat there.

Not in wonder, as I have with great books, but in confusion.

I thought this guy was otherworldly. This book seems so pedestrian.

Which, I guess, leads to another question.

Am I missing something?

I’ve never been to India. I’ve never been to the east coast, or attended an Ivy League school. I’ve never traveled up and down the coast searching my soul. I’ve never had parents who were born in another country, who couldn’t understand why I was unwilling to honor their traditions, no matter how outdated and out of style.

Yet, I feel like, given the chance, I could perform in these situations without fail, my mind fully understanding the consequences of each action. I could be a second-generation Indian living in Boston. I could travel to Calcutta and know what it feels like to be both privileged and brilliant.

Thanks, Jhumpa.

Jhumpa Lahiri – who won the Pulitzer for her first book of short stories, Interpreter of Maladies – has a style that’s genuine, not tricky or cute. There’s no mind-bending literary allusions, no sideways words or slight of hand. It’s all honest; great writing from a mind that seems to understand every aspect of social and psychological growth, from child to adult.

Unaccustomed Earth is like Interpreter of Maladies in that it’s a book of short stories. It’s unlike Interpreter in that there’s a common theme throughout each story: the chasm that separates parents born in India from their largely Americanized children. It’s this theme that makes everything so relatable. After all, the reader gets several chances to capture the feeling of confusion in living someplace new, or the pained development of a college student as he struggles to ditch his old culture in preference to the new.

The scenes seem the same – private school education, solemn fathers, traditional mothers, young adults struggling to understand their place between two cultures. But it’s the emotion that makes each story so phenomenal. These are studies into the minds of multi-continental misfits; unable to effectively fit into a mold, they move from adoration to frustration in just pages. They are human, as relatable as any characters I’ve ever read.

What I remember most about Lahiri’s stories is their finality. Often, short stories are left open-ended, leaving the reader to deduct each character’s final outcome through a series of hints. It’s what makes short stories so creative – they can begin and end at any point.

Lahiri, on the other hand, leaves only a slight opening, summing up each story with some of the most powerful final words I’ve ever read. They’re still open ended, but they close in a way that brings conclusion, the stories ending not like a bottle with the bottom cut out, but like a cloth bag with a string tied around it.

I thought I would be frustrated, reading about the same type of character over and over again across eight stories. Instead, it helped me focus. And by the end, I had nothing but praise.