* JULY 25, 2009, 6:35 A.M. ET

Five Best
Matthew Kaminski selects his favorite novels about immigrants in America


1. Pnin
By Vladimir Nabokov
Doubleday, 1957

Timofey Pnin, the 52-year-old with “a glossy bald head” who teaches
Russian at “somewhat provincial” Waindell College, is lost. Train
schedules, the proper use of articles in English and the habits of the
natives routinely stump him. His is a common immigrant’s plight. Yet
there’s no one quite like Pnin in literature, or life. Among Nabokov’s
creations, he’s the anti-Humbert Humbert—that is, a man very different
from the wayward ­narrator of “Lolita,” also a foreigner in America.
Pnin, Nabokov once ­explained, is “a man of great moral courage, a pure
man, a scholar and a staunch friend, serenely wise, faithful to a single
love, he never descends from a high plane of life characterized by
authenticity and integrity.” He is also a comically tragic,
absent-minded and endearing character—an intellectual cast adrift in
America and ­nostalgic for a lost world. In Pnin’s case, as in
Nabokov’s, the lost world is that of pre-Revolutionary Russia.

2. Netherland
By Joseph O’Neill
Pantheon, 2008

Chuck Ramkissoon steals the show with his first ­appearance in Joseph
O’Neill’s ­“Netherland”: hand-cuffed, dead for more than two years,
just found at the bottom of Brooklyn’s Gowanus Canal (“There’s death
in the old girl yet,” O’Neill writes). We go on to learn the story of
this colorful Trinidadian with big plans—and Ramkissoon is hardly the
only immigrant in this story set in post-9/11 New York. O’Neill’s
protagonist is Hans ban den Broek, a Dutch banker, now living in New
York, whose passion for cricket increases as his troubled marriage
declines. Hans ­realizes that he has left Amsterdam behind forever when,
on a visit to ­London, he attends a dinner-party where the conversation
turns ­anti-American: “My secret, almost shameful feeling is that I am
out of New York—that New York interposed itself, once and for all,
between me and all other places of origin.”

3. Call It Sleep
By Henry Roth
Ballou, 1934

In his masterwork, Henry Roth does for New York’s Lower East Side what
Joyce did for Dublin, capturing its neighborhoods and folkways, its
distinctive smells and babel of sounds. Told from the ­perspective of
David Schearl, a precocious boy growing up in the Jewish slum, “Call It
Sleep” is a touching ­coming-of-age story. When David and his mother
­arrive from Austria, joining his father in the “Golden Land,” she
brings a ­secret from the Old World, as so many émigrés do—in her case,
the shame of a forbidden love for a non-Jew back home. David’s
irascible­ ­father, ­struggling to make a living, ­resents him—and
suspects that David is not in fact his biological son. There is a mildly
incestuous note in the closeness between David and his mother, and that
is not the novel’s only Oedipal theme: An adoptive nation, we are made
to see, can truly be a home only for the immigrant child— the father is
an outsider, destined to be displaced and shown up by the son.

4. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
By Junot Diaz
Riverhead, 2007

The eponymous hero of Junot Diaz’s breakout novel is a fat, warm,
complex, lonely, sex-starved, sci-fi-obsessed New Jersey kid who happens
to be a Dominican. We’re in Philip Roth ­territory here. Wao’s angst
is that of an adolescent (where does he, a ­Dominican “GhettoNerd,”
fit in?) and of an immigrant (ditto). Diaz peppers his book with Spanish
phrases and ­pop-dweeb trivia without explaining ­either, which in no
way hurts the book. As for sections of the novel set back in the native
land of Oscar’s mother, extended footnotes are provided “for those of
you who missed your ­mandatory two seconds of Dominican history.” The
novel is a rare ­accomplishment, a serious literary work with “street”
appeal.

5. Interpreter of Maladies
By Jhumpa Lahiri
Houghton Mifflin, 1999

Jhumpa Lahiri was born in England and reared in America, but the focus
of her Pulitzer Prize-winning ­debut short-story collection is on
characters, like her parents, who are Indian immigrants in the U.S. They
lead their lives here as well or as badly as anyone else. A young
professional couple in Boston struggles after the death of their baby.
The daughter of Indian ­immigrants studies American history during the
1971 Pakistani civil war. A family of second-generation Indian-Americans
in New Brunswick, N.J., takes a holiday in India. A Bengali man recalls
finding his place in America yet following the traditional practice of
­entering an arranged marriage. A ­couple of the stories take place in
­India, but most in some way explore the experience of leaving behind
one culture and adapting to another. But Lahiri doesn’t exoticize her
characters or settings. These are American tales.
—Mr. Kaminski is a member of the Journal’s editorial board.