THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS
“You must really love her." An elderly woman had remarked after she’d watched me read the last page of Jhumpa’s Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies and immediately pull out 2009’s Unaccustomed Earth from my travel bag.
We were waiting for the perpetually late Hampton Jitney on a humid Friday afternoon in July. I was nannying out there five days a week. It was the summer of 2012, and the best respite from entertaining two boys all day was through reading.
Now I'll be honest - as an aspiring writer, Jhumpa Lahiri’s skill for the short form is anxiety-inducing. How can an author be this good? is a question that had plagued me as I devoured her cache of work that July. Could I ever be this good? had quickly followed.
So, as you might’ve guessed, I wanted to love her latest work, and I bought it from my favorite bookstore, Three Lives, the day it came out in September.
The Lowland tells the epic story of two brothers, Subhash and Udayan, coming of age in South Calcutta during a time of violent upheaval in response to excessive force by an unstable government and incredible wealth disparity.
As a college student in the sixties, Udayan, the more impulsive, risk-seeking (and younger) brother, becomes steeped in the Maoist-leaning, militant Naxalite movement that grew out of a remote village in West Bengali and spread into the city proper. The ultimately defeated Naxalites had demanded a redistribution of the country’s wealth and resources to uplift the impoverished rural class. Although unsettled by the high level of corruption and revolutionary bloodshed, Subhash dutifully takes to his oceanography studies in the States and turns away from his brother.
Back in India, Udayan marries a studious philosophy major, Gauri, against his parents’ wishes, and his involvement as a Naxalite deepens. Suddenly an incident occurs, and Subhash returns to India to change the life of his newly-widowed and pregnant sister-in-law.
***
As always, Lahiri renders her settings with meticulous care. The oddly comforting grey and cold of the Rhode Island beaches where Subhash accumulates his degrees is contrasted by the hot and teeming Tollygunge neighborhood where the boys grew up and Udayan continues to live after his brother moves.
The story is sweeping and broad, unfolding in different countries, decades, and points of view. However, Lahiri returns to the stage she knows best - the domestic home - for most of the book as Gauri reels from Udayan's choices, acclimates to Western society in the seventies, and trembles in the face of motherhood.
I appreciate the way Lahiri writes the women in Lowland. They are incredibly complex and unapologetic. We find with Gauri that maternal love for a child can be eclipsed by scholarly and professional pursuits. Udayan and Subhash's mother, burdened by grief, can't find the kindness in heart to welcome her daughter-in-law into her home despite the grandchild she's carrying. Subhash's first love, an older white woman in the midst of a separation and ten years older than him, seeks him out for sexual comfort and distraction from her failing marriage. I think it's important to read women not chasing after companionship, freeing us from that literary (and real life) cliche.
Yet, there's a level of dispassion and flatness that hinders the book's ultimate effect. The writing is, of course, beautiful, but it's also full of a restraint and self-awareness that inform how the characters behave. There's always something they want to do, someone they want to reach out to, but can't for a myriad of (in my opinion, unacceptable) reasons. The consequence is that for 300+ pages I felt like I was reading about people who were in a constant state of arrested development and internal questioning. There wasn't a lot of doing or action that could justify Lowland's length. I greatly enjoyed reading about the Naxalite movement, which I shamefully didn't know anything about, and Gauri's eruditeness is something I aspire to, but I wasn't entirely captivated by Lahiri's storytelling like I have been in the past.
Definitely pick it up if you're fan of hers. The book was just shortlisted for the National Book Award and Man Booker Prize, so there's good stuff in it, but personally, I don't think this is Lahiri's best work.
Next weeks' review: A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki
