At last the book group completely agrees about a book. (The Lowland). Any guess what we thought?

In 25+ years of book group we have never been so unanimous in our judgment of a book, with the possible exception of The Bridges of Madison County, but we knew that was kind of a joke, as we were last night when we discussed Jhumpa Lahiri's The Lowland. You might think I'm going to say we all loved it? Well if you've read my posts you certainly know that I did not love it - I thought it was terribly written, dull and schematic, unfocused and unrewarding, and most of all an enormous disappointment from a writer so many of us, me included have admired, especially for her short fiction (Interpreter of Maladies, Unaccustomed Earth), one of the few literary writers to have found, and earned, serious popular support. So I went into group think I'd be in the distinct minority, worried about defending my position without seeming cranky or ill-natured, in fact worrying that maybe I'd missed something altogether. But then, one after another, the 8 of us weighed in: universal disappointment and disdain: loathing for the main characters, Subhash the doormat and Gauri the bitch; despair at the flat descriptions, the lack of emotional engagement, the plot just grinding along, inclusion of extraneous detail failure to develop any scene or any crisis point (we generally did like the early scene of trespassing on the golf course, and I thought the Bela - Gauri confrontation was pretty good); I in particular pointed out her obsession with sentences fragments and how that damages and actually cheapens a narrative - an example of mailing it in. I suggested that this was her attempt to write about her parents' generation - maybe even about a family she knows or knew - and it was a failure (Bela is more typical of other Lahiri characters, American born or raised of Indian descent and struggling between family expectations and her own yearnings - but so undeveloped - as JR noted, there's an episode of her w/ a therapist, and then, bim bam, in a few page, cured, and we move relentlessly on. JR also particularly bristled at Gauri's skipping out on a conference speaking engagement w/out so much as a call or note, and I agree - total narcissist bitch (and it would have been so easy to continue on w/ her journey after the conference instead of instead of). So the tepidly negative reviews I read after finishing the novel were, I think, holding back. Did anyone serious like this book? JR said it came out of the pressure to produce book after book, but I'm not so sure of that - I think it came out of the fame-blinded judgment of many editors and agents, out of the greed of a publishing house that couldn't say no, out of a writer who is in danger of losing her way if she thinks that this was good writing - does it have anything to do w/ her estrangement from the U.S.? Exile sure didn't hurt Joyce. I don't know - hope she writes some more great stories, though, and regains her bearings.