In Jhumpa Lahiri's 'Roman Stories,' many characters are caught between two worlds

In Jhumpa Lahiri's 'Roman Stories,' many characters are caught between two worlds Knopf Readers who have missed the compelling narratives that Jhumpa Lahiri wrote in English before her switch to Italian in 2015 will be happy to learn that Roman Stories is a return to form. Sponsor Message Like Alberto Moravia's Roman Tales, with its portraits of life in the poorer sections of Rome after the second world war, Lahiri shifts her attention in several of these nine stories from well-to-do expats and native Romans to new refugees and immigrants struggling to gain a toehold in a cruelly unwelcoming society. Particularly heartrending are stories like "Well-Lit House," which is narrated by a young man who gratefully lands in a 500-sq.-ft. apartment in a sketchy neighborhood outside Rome with his gracious, elegantly veiled wife and five small children after years in refugee camps and shared apartments — only to be hounded and chased from it by xenophobic neighbors. Sponsor Message Lahiri's characters are frequently ambushed — whether by unexpected emotions, like the husband caught off-guard by his adulterous feelings in "P's Parties" — or by actual assault, like the screenwriter mugged on the deserted steps late one night by a group of kids, who take his cash and the digital watch his young second wife gave him for his 60th birthday.