A few days ago, I observed that the media's framework for understanding Jhumpa Lahiri often got stuck on the notion that she keeps writing about families of South Asian descent in the United States. In this week's New Republic, Adelle Waldman offers a thoughtful analysis of Unaccustomed Earth, Lahiri's new story collection, proposing that what some critics see as a focus on ethnicity is really a focus on class, sketching out a society where 'brown skin matters exponentially less than a degree from Brown, and Jews and Asians outnumber WASPs," a fictionalized version of the culture David Brooks describes in books like Bobos in Paradise:

"Her tales of marriage, divorce, becoming a parent, and grappling with the death of adult parents are the opposite of exotic," Waldman writes; "her fiction winds up painting a very intelligent portrait of upper middle class life. They aren't immigrant stories, not in a traditional sense. Rather, Lahiri is a literary heir of Anthony Trollope in her ability to capture the way we live now. And that's a testament to the way society has changed—the gradual diminution of ethnic boundaries, at least among the educated elite—but also to Lahiri's skill at evoking this world empathetically and unironically. This is a demographic that is used to being mocked—even to mocking itself. Who, after all, proclaims proudly that he or she is a bobo?"