"The Lowland' (by Jhumpa Lahiri)
The landscape, as well as the lives unfolding within it, is conjured magnificently: the marshy lowland in Calcutta is thick with water hyacinth, its periphery dotted with simple huts, the poor wading in to forage for food. This is a place where certain creatures "laid eggs that were able to endure the dry season. Others survived by burying themselves in mud, simulating death, waiting for the return of rain". Survival is fraught for the humans, too, in this engrossing novel.
Two brothers, Subhash and Udayan, often walk across the lowland on their way to play football. Though very different, one cautious and one of them reckless, the boys are very close: "Subhash was 13, older by 15 months. But he had no sense of himself without Udayan. From his earliest memories, at every point, his brother was there." Yet this is a novel in which the most tender of ties are torn asunder, and Lahiri traces these lives as they become haunted by the absence of loved ones.
The daring that Udayan displays in childhood is fatally demonstrated in adulthood, too, when he is swept up in the country's Naxalite rebellion against poverty and inequality, while Subhash pursues a peaceful life of scientific research in America. After Udayan's untimely death, Subhash returns to India and marries his brother's pregnant widow, Gauri, but theirs is far from a smoothly functioning family. The ambitious, if uneven narrative traces the tensions between husband and wife, and between mother and daughter, as Gauri's parental instinct battles with her yearning for independence.
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The personal is political, the countercultural upheavals of the ’60s claimed, but in Jhumpa Lahiri’s new novel, “The Lowland,” which takes its inspiration from an Indian variant of that upheaval, it is the political that is always personal. Udayan, the younger of two brothers in the eastern Indian city of Calcutta (now Kolkata), gets drawn into a radical left movement called Naxalism, its name derived from Naxalbari, a tiny village to the north of Calcutta where impoverished peasants rose up against the police and landlords in 1967, sparking off dreams of a nationwide insurgency that would replicate Mao’s earlier revolution in China. But Udayan is killed by the police, and his older brother, Subhash, apolitical, passive, but responsible, returns home from graduate school in the United States to console his parents. Finding himself confronted with his brother’s pregnant widow, Gauri, and her ill treatment by his grieving parents, Subhash marries her and brings her to Rhode Island. Gauri gives birth to a girl, Bela, while also pursuing an academic career of her own in philosophy. By the end of the novel, when Bela is almost 40, the reader will have encountered four generations of this particular family.
It sounds epic in sweep, especially when combined with the laden, potent themes, the intertwining of politics and sexuality, the cauterizing of emotional wounds and grievances, and the repetition of places and personalities. Subhash, who has escaped a city he sees as disorganized as well as violent, and who studies oceanography, finds in the beaches of Rhode Island a resemblance to the delta lowlands surrounding Calcutta. Bela, brought up almost entirely by Subhash, seems to inherit not his passivity but her biological father’s radical streak in becoming a drifter working on organic farms. Throughout, Lahiri’s prose hums along as efficiently as a well-tuned engine, showing us the melancholy beauty of coastal New England; the surreal perceptions of an immigrant (so that Subhash sees in the turning leaves of fall the “vivid hues of cayenne and turmeric and ginger pounded fresh every morning”); and the tension between generations, from the sense of abandonment and vulnerability felt by Bela to the terror of parenting, with its visions of failure and foreboding, faced by Subhash and Gauri.
For all that, “The Lowland” does not seem to be trying to be an epic novel. Although it plays with secrets and emotional turning points (whether Bela will find out about her biological father, whether Udayan was a victim of police brutality or a deluded, violent man), it seems to possess no singular trajectory and no dominant idea beyond that of generational drift. Lahiri’s previous novel, “The Namesake,” which depicted the angst of a young Bengali-American named Gogol, had the virtues of a ferocious devotion to realist description, a satirical edge when probing upper-class New York pretensions, and a simple, linear plot. Here, the narrative moves back and forth through time and across the points of view of all the principal characters, but this diffusion does not appear to be in the service of formal playfulness or experimentation in the spirit of one of the many variants of modernism. This is a contemporary novel only in the sense that it knows the brisk economy of the screenplay, or the efficient design of an Apple product.
If some of those strengths are present in the new novel, they seem adrift in its larger swaths of time and space, diluted by waves of politics and history that Lahiri herself has chosen to bring in. Apart from Gauri, compellingly opaque at moments, the characters seem frozen into types — Subhash (dull but capable), Udayan (charismatic but irresponsible) and Bela (the rebel with a tattoo on her ankle and a compost bin in the backyard). Their misery, although powerfully depicted in scenes of confrontation or isolation, seems to be deeply private, personal, ultimately without reference to the ostensible political background introduced every now and then as Lahiri returns to the execution scene, playing it one way in depicting the brutality of the police and then the other in revealing Udayan’s own complicity in a crime. There is mention of Marx and Adorno; of S.D.S.; and of Charu Majumdar and Kanu Sanyal, the two central ideologues of the Naxalite movement. There are somewhat rote descriptions of demonstrations, political meetings and slogans on the wall, but not a single line of the Naxal poetry or songs that flared through India at the time, in numerous languages, and that formed a far more defining aspect of the movement than the badly made bombs and dense theoretical tracts mentioned in the novel.
Lahiri’s work has always seemed much more assured within the tighter confines of the short story than the novel. Her first collection, “Interpreter of Maladies,” displayed a high technical virtuosity while introducing readers to what has become her fictional realm: that small, claustrophobic milieu of Bengali Hindus working research and academic jobs in New England, Boston Brahmins twice over. “The Third and Final Continent,” the last story in the collection — and one popular in high schools and writing programs, probably as much for reaffirming assumptions about America as a benevolent, welcoming place for immigrants as for its controlled prose — contained all the stock elements of Lahiri’s repertory. It had the male Bengali immigrant working at a university, the sheltered wife who follows him abroad and the white American who, initially forbidding, turns out to be a paragon of humanity. That realm of South Asian privilege took on a darker tinge in Lahiri’s second collection, “Unaccustomed Earth,” where the veneer of professional success was shot through with alcoholism, suicidal impulses and depression, especially among the women. America, or India, or the world at large remained a backdrop, more or less faint, as the characters maneuvered through their heavy psychological landscape, but the narrow focus rarely felt like weakness. There was too much mystery about the peripatetic characters, unfinished, contingent selves moving through stories as neatly structured as the suburban housing divisions they emerged from.
There is a similar absence even when it comes to depicting America or contemporary India. There are passing references to the civil rights movement and the antiwar demonstrations, to organic farming and an Obama sticker, to India’s vaunted new economic policies (now suddenly in trouble) and to the re-emergence of the Naxalites, now underground in the forests of central India, but these things seem to have as little to do with the characters as the characters have to do with them. It makes all four generations of the family appear strangely bereft, not so much upwardly mobile immigrants making it into the promised land as much as characters flailing at the boundaries of life, wanting to be let across the borders into the mysterious disquiet that afflicts so much of the rest of humanity.
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