A possible reason why Lahiri has written such an flat novel

Inevitably, Jhumpa Lahiri's The Lowland builds slowly toward its conclusion at which the 3 main characters - Subhash, Gauri, and Bela - meet for the first time since Gauri's departure, having lived apart for some 40 years. In the chapters building up to this confrontation we get some important information about Gauri's early married life as we learn that she was an accomplice helping her husband Udayan in his radical-terrorist activities, in fact helping him bring off the assassination of a policeman, which inevitably led to Udayan's arrest and killing. This is a source of the guilt that Gauri has been carrying for her entire life - although nothing can truly explain her misery, her meanness, and her abandonment of husband and daughter - much less why neither she nor daughter, Bela, have made even the slightest attempt at reconciliation. Lahiri chugs along through the chapters of the characters' lives - this book encompasses about 60 years of time in the lives of two characters, so for better or worse Lahiri cannot afford to slow down her pace and develop any scene carefully or lovingly. In fact, as noted in previous posts, she almost intentionally avoids scenes, or so it seems - one chapter I read yesterday is prototypical: There is a potential scene in which Bela comes home from one of her wanderings to find that her father has begun a relationship with a woman who, as it turns out, was one of her high-school teachers; Bela gets truly upset, leaves home for a while, eventually reconciles. But do we see this as a scene, with dialog and description? We do not. Rather, Lahiri narrates the whole episode from a distant standpoint - Bela remember, Bela thought, etc. - all this leading to the feeling that this novel is a vast summary of events but none or at least very few are realized in ways that we expect in naturalist literary fiction. Maybe Lahiri, smart as she is, is playing with us in some grander scheme, intentionally writing a "flat" novel to convey the lack of affect in her characters' lives: chilling how little love is expressed in this family, how easily they accept abandonment, and in Udayan's case how readily he participates in a murder. The only one who feel emotions, it seems at times, are U and S's parents back in Calcutta, who, on the death of their son, spend their lives in mourning and misery, tending the memorial to Udayan in the trash-filled marsh of the title.