The Lowland--Jhumpa Lahiri's Almost Great Novel of a Wider World

Jhumpa Lahiri's stories have always pleased me, although when she published her last collection Unaccustomed Earth I complained that her world was too circumscribed.
Only once do outside events intrude: one story  contains a reference to the 2004 tsunami.
And, as I noted in my review, "It seems Lahiri is a little uncomfortable about that even. “The real event just sort of caught my character in there,” she told one interviewer. “I don’t tackle major global events. I don’t like to read about something—an event, a cataclysm—in fiction for the sake of reading it." Better to turn to non-fiction for accounts of events, she said: "that’s what good nonfiction is for. And I think that the fact there is a major global event in (my) book—I don’t know if it was okay or not.”"

At the time I thought it was most definitely  okay. " In the future," I wrote then, " I hope she continues to tell us stories about how the people she imagines fit into a world wider than one of good schools, deadly but well-managed illness and love which sometimes is arranged and sometimes is not."

In her newest book, The Lowland, she certainly has embraced a bigger world view.  The story of two brothers born in Calcutta shortly before Indian independence covers a good 65 years and more than half the globe.  The younger brother becomes involved in an radical group, and is executed by police, leaving a young pregnant wife.  The older brother, who is much less political, comes back, marries the woman, and brings her to the US. The novel explores how this second marriage goes wrong and how the characters struggle with their destinies against political events beyond their control and social context that they only slowly understand.

The lowland in which the brothers grow up, and the seashore where the older one spends his professional life are points off correspondance between one part of the world and another, and I spent some time trying unsuccessfully to figure out what the symbolism of the landscape was.

Neverthless the book is compelling reading and had it not come so highly praised, I probably would have been blown away by it.  But, as noted in the last post, sometimes literary success comes with a down side--expectations too high to be successfully fulfilled.

Lahiri seems to have much better control of her material in the first two-thirds of the book.  But the narrative arc becomes indistinct as she progresses: there are at least a half dozen places she could have ended the story, several of which might have made a tauter book.  As it is she takes us to nearly the end of her major characters lives, gives us a little "lady or the tiger" moment when it looks like one character might end it all, and repeats many times  scenes she's presented earlier. 

The result isn't a failure, but it isn't as completely realized as I'd hoped it would be.  She should be given points, however, for trying to expand her horizons.