Jhumpa Lahiri

I am on my second book by Lahiri, and am struck by how depressing her books are. Unaccustomed Earth is a collection of short stories, so we get to see many of her characters and they all seem to be living these sad, hopeless lives, with no joy in them. The immigrant parents inevitably have an arranged marriage with no bond between them, the mothers always cooking and the fathers busy with their jobs, clinging by a frayed thread to their roots in India. The children spend their lives in misery, straddling the two worlds. Nobody seems to have a purpose or any kind of optimism. Being an immigrant myself, this really bites. I have enough perspective to see that my life is not necessarily like the parents of most of Lahiri's characters. It just might be because I am from a different generation than what her own parents might have been from. It is obvious that her characters have all come out of her own life - is that really the shared story of first generation Indian Americans? Are my children doomed to lead such hopeless, torn, divided lives - trying to break free from their parents, yet never quite assimilating into the life in the US? I am thinking of abandoing the book, because I have been completely depressed since I started reading it.