What has happened to Jhumpa Lahiri's style?

The opening section of Jhumpa Lahiri's The Lowland is shocking - I'm pinching myself and asking can this possibly be a Lahiri novel? Or is there some imposter author using her name? What happened to the famous lapidary Lahiri style, the beautiful sentences, the perfectly balanced and timed paragraphs, the rich insights into character and conditions? The first 40 pages or so, which take place in the 1950s and 60s in Calcutta and focus on two brothers - let me for the moment just call them by their initials, S and U, as I don't recall the spelling of their names - growing up roughly middle class but curious about and envious of the lives of the privileged (they trespass on the gated country club grounds and are caught and beaten) yet aware of the dire poverty of the refugees from Pakistan living in slum conditions - they both go to college, U, the more adventuresome brother, becomes a radical and activist, while the more timid and convention S heads to the U.S. (their initials, BTW) , to Rhode Island (where Lahiri was raised) in fact, to study oceanography. OK, that's a quick summary - but the whole section reads like a plot summary! - just a series of facts and details unloaded, not even narrated in complete sentences. Just fragments. Like this. It feels like a sketch for a story, or for a screenplay. I will say that the style deepens when the narrative follows S to Rhode Island - whether because this is more familiar ground for Lahiri or because that's where the story begins to settle into place, I don't know. I wonder if she could have ditched the first 40 pages - the novel might still work. I'm withholding judgment overall until I read much further - her accomplishments as a writer have earned that much attention - but I have felt from her first books that her greatest strengths are in the short form, which requires more of a concentration and focus - and that her long fiction - i.e., The Namesake - is a little more meandering and imprecise.