The dog barks, the plot moves on - The Lowland

Jhumpa Lahiri nears the finish line of her novel The Lowland and takes off on a sprint through the years of the lives of her characters. Was anyone surprised to see that Gauri took off on her family while Subhash and daughter Bela were visiting his parents in Calcutta - they return home and find the grade grown up to shoulder height (unlikely), the house abandoned, and a note in Bengali to Subhash saying she took off for a teaching job in California. If I was surprised at anything it's the unlikelihood of the next 20 years - a span of time that Lahiri dispatches w/ in about 30 pages - Subhash remaining near-celibate, a eunuch-like long-suffering character, in my opinion; daughter Bela after a childhood depression which had some narrative potential but Lahiri just blows through it, becomes an environmental radical nomad, living on subsistence organic farming and more or less out of touch w/ father and completely out of touch with mother Gauri. As to Gauri, she has a successful academic career in California, has a brief Lesbian fling with a grad student advisee, and goes on w/ her life - troubled occasionally by guilt about her actions but not enough to make any attempt to reconcile or even to learn about the fate of her daughter. I found this whole section very sorrowful - three troubled lives - but I keep feeling through this novel that it's like a grand plot summary, event after event but hardly a single scene or action or moment of reflection. As noted in previous posts, there is no effort whatsoever to "show" rather than "tell" - it's a completely "told" novel - it's like an outline for a much longer novel that will never and probably could never be written. Lahiri's abundant imagination has run far ahead of her talent here - she would have been so much better off developing some of these elements as stories or as a shorter and more deeply felt and poignantly rendered novel - no one is more capable of that that she is. Toward the end, Subhash encounters by chance his old grad-school roommate and they rekindle their friendship over the next two years (in this novel that's about 2 paragraphs) and then the friend dies unexpectedly. Again, there's potential here - but it would mean so much more if Lahiri had made their friendship in graduate school more meaningful  and significant, or if they had stayed in touch throughout the course of the novel, but, no, it's just one more event that clicks off as the plot chugs relentlessly along toward its conclusion.