Jhumpa Lahiri, whose Interpreter of Maladies is one of the few debut story collections to win the Pulitzer Prize, builds on her previous themes of the Indian-American immigrant experience with her trademark clear, gorgeous language and singular storytelling mastery in her second novel, The Lowland.
The story spans 70 years, opening with two inseparable brothers in Calcutta. Subhash, the older boy, is cautious and reserved; the younger, Udayan, is the charming risk-taker. Subhash later goes to the U.S. for university, while Udayan makes a love match to marry Gauri and becomes a political revolutionary. Later, when Udayan sacrifices everything for his beliefs, Subhash returns to India, stepping into Udayan's life try to heal the wounds he left behind. He eventually brings a pregnant Gauri back to the U.S. with him, hoping to remain connected to his brother and drawn by Gauri's grief. Subhash creates a career and something approaching a home for himself, Gauri and Gauri's daughter, Bela. Lahiri is at her best here, giving each character room to tell his or her own story and reveal what they left behind, what they hope to find, what comes instead and the secrets they take with them. Gauri tries to find peace; Subhash wrestles with the secret he keeps from Bela; Bela grows into adulthood and struggles to understand her mother's choices. Lahiri is particularly adept at exploring the questions of independence and loyalty; what mothers and daughters owe each other; what defines fatherhood and family; and the long shadow of absence.
With a story spanning generations and continents, The Lowland is epic in scope. But Lahiri also, through sheer technical wizardry, creates a story shimmering with the interplay of time and memory and how her characters understand the arc of their lives: the narrative pushes forward chronologically through the decades, with shifting points of view, each of the main characters dipping into memory to understand their present. The structure is not the more familiar one of an older character looking back to tell a story; rather, it is intricate and increasingly textured and mirrors the way we experience life. The intimate, close-up look at the characters in India, where small gestures reveal everything, gradually gives way to a wide-angled and panoramic view, as though the narrative camera zooms back to encompass the vast American backdrop while moving through time. In the final two chapters, the characters are shown at such a remove they are not identified, but we know them so well the names are unnecessary.
If this sleight of hand is sometimes at the expense of an immediate emotional connection to Lahiri's characters, as she does so well in her stories where compression amplifies the impact of every word and gesture, The Lowland is nevertheless a gorgeous novel, unexpected and ambitious, full of hope and longing--a novel to savor. --Jeanette Zwart
Shelf Talker: A beautiful, ambitious, complex novel, already shortlisted for the Man Booker, about an Indian-American family finding its way to acceptance and love despite their history and secrets.