Surprise! A "traditional" story in the New Yorker

Nell Freudenberger's story "An Arranged Marriage" in the current New Yorker is a throwback, a traditional story that believe it or not actually comes to a conclusion and feels complete in and of itself and doesn't seem like either a chapter in a novel shoehorned into the magazine nor like an open vigentte with no beginning, middle, end - a sketch that the author had no idea how to complete. Freudenberger sees her story whole and seems to know where she's going; if anything, the cute conclusion is a little too tight and too self-consciously foreshadowed, but we'll let that go. Story is of a marriage between a Bangladeshi woman and a Rochester guy who meet on a date site; she moves to Rochester, lives with him for a short time, then the wedding ceremony. She is always completely clear in her mind - and with him, in fact - that this marriage is about improving her economic status and get her out of poverty. Her parents, with some guilt about their inability to help, approve. There's no passion in this marriage, but, following her family tradition of arranged marriages, she is sure she can learn to love him and be a good wife. Obviously we keep expecting the worst to happen - a betrayal, a miscommunication, some weird sexual perversion. The surprise, I guess, is the lack of surprise - husband seems to be a sweet, nerdy guy and really does want to marry her. Story is every sense a real throwback. It's not really fair to complain that I want more depth in the characters - it's only a story, after all - but the husband is quite opaque, and the wife is swathed in exoticism, that is, as with many other stories that Americans place in foreign settings, the writer overdoes it with the “color,” using many foreign-language terms and geographic reference points to make the story seem authentic, which it does not, it just seems researched – product of a Fulbright grant perhaps. The better parts of this story are those set in Rochester, and I almost wish she could have managed to set the whole story there.