Why The Lowland is hardly a Dickensian novel

No doubt the best scenes and moments in Jhumpa Lahiri's The Lowland occur at or near the very end: Gauri  returning, unannounced!, to the home she'd abandoned 40 years ago, and being confronted by her abandoned daughter, Bela - a great moment when Bela says to her: How dare you! At last someone stands up for themselves - everyone in the novel up to this point except for the long-gone Udayan has been essentially a doormat. Another fine moment is the account of Udayan's last days or day: his suffering after the murder of the policeman, his fear, hiding in the lowland marsh until the police find him, his very last moment of consciousness. Also, Gauri's guilt about her participation in the murder of the policeman. That said: these scenes are far, far too late to rescue this tedious and poorly written novel, I'm sorry to say. Though the final scenes have a certain poignancy - Subhash newly married and visiting some ancient field in Ireland, for example, is a fine moment - but what does it really add to this long novel? At the end, sorry for these spoilers, but this is hardly a surprise, Gauri thinks about suicide - during another one of her sudden and unannounced (and actually very selfish - she blows off a speaking engagement to do this) trip to her homeland - but she backs off; Bela, too, backs off from her bitterness and allows her daughter to maintain contact w/ Gauri. In other words, Lahiri avoids any great dramatic scenes right up to the end - the only "drama" is the capture and shooting of Udayan, right near the outset. I wish I did not have to be so negative - I have greatly admired so much of Lahiri's work - but honestly are the raves and the sales for this book based on the quality of this novel or the reputation of the author? I peeked at one review, which I rarely do, and saw the inevitable comparison with Dickens. Why? This is by no means a Dickensian novel except that it's long - and covers a large span of time. But just compare this with, I don't know, David Copperfield: are the characters vivid and sharply drawn? Do we get the sense of the life of a whole culture? Are there dramatic, even melodramatic or operatic moments? Hardly. It's a novel crammed w/ research, the seams all showing, that never rises above a simmer.

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.

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.

A violation of the first principle of fiction writing - Show don't tell - in The Lowland

The next section of Jhumpa Lahiri's The Lowland involves a return to Calcutta and to Subhash's family - we see his mother, now quite a bit older, tending the memorial marker of her murdered son, Udayan, which sits at the edge of the lowland swamp, trashed every day with debris and other detritus. She is now widowed, and much of this section involves her recollection of the last years of her husband's life, as he gradually retreated from life in his own form of mourning for Udayan. She also feels regret for her estrangement from her surviving child, Subhash; she had told him and Gauri, now his wife, that they should never return to their homeland, and now she regrets this estrangement - she has never met her granddaughter, Bela. This whole  section is told by an omniscient narrator - a very long section telling us what the mother is thinking, without really much action at all in any way, which makes me wonder why Lahiri has strayed so far from the basic principle of all fiction writing: show don't tell. She rectifies this problem to a degree as the section moves along and Subhash and daughter, Bela, now about 12 years old?, not clear, make their first return journey to Calcutta. At least more happens in this section - as Subhash mourns his father's death, as he and Bela take several excursions into the city, as she begins to understand more about her family background. The two great unspokens in this section are: where is Gauri? and : when  will Bela learn that Subhash is her uncle and not her father? Subhash's mother at various times either intentionally or inadvertently is about to tell Bela the truth, but this  fact hovers just a little beyond the perimeter. As to Gauri, I for one was surprised to learn that she is still married to Subhash, now pursuing a doctoral degree, and I wonder why neither of them  has been substantially changed by their many years in the U.S. One should leave the other, for sure. This the section of the novel, though nicely narrated, would be stronger by far if it were giving us information we didn't have: we are not really learning much new here, just waiting for ticking bomb to go off, for Bela to learn the truth about her family, and to see what the consequences might be for  her and Subhash.

Is Lahiri's The Lowland a modern Doll's House?

Now about halfway through Jhumpa Lahiri's The Lowland and have not entirely changed my opinion butam beingwon over to a degree. I find the style very flat and enengaging, esp for a writer whohas built her reputation -- well deserved -- on her beautifuly crafted prose. Thisnovel feels like it's a long story that has been passed down to her -- whether it's from herown family or from other Indian immigrant families is immaterial -- and she has to just get it all down. The story covers a large swath of timea lifetime in fact and Lahiri rarely pauses to develop a moment a scene or an episode. Thenarrative feels very removed and external. That said I do find myself strangely engaged in the very sad lives of the two main characters -Subhash the hapless older brother who always tried to do the right thing and pays the price and his wife, Gauri (notice how her name contains the initials of the university setting) who marries Subhash knowing she can never love him and in fact never tries. In some ways this is a novel about a young woman wife mother discovering herself in the early days of feminism in the US, breaking from her culture, her marriage, her child, and going off - a modern Doll's House (perhaps not a tragedy, though - we'll see) but to Lahiri's credit she does not lionize Gauri -- we see her as deeply flawed and selfish -- as well as oppressed and humiliated -- and we feel sorrow and sympathy from the near-abandoned (and maybe soon to be abandoned?) Subhash. I only wish that Lahiri could have tightened this novel - perhaps as a first-person narration looking back? Or told it as a novella? I still think her work is at its best in the tighter and more demanding format of the short story.

The Elliot's Reading Top 100 Books - with authors' names included!

Here is the Elliot's Reading Top 100 Books, with authors' names included. Thanks for your suggestions for filling the "100th" spot - which opened up after alert reader TG noticed that On the Road appeared twice. I mentioned some of the suggestions in previous posts; others that came in asked about Doris Lessing - I really liked her earlier, African-set novels and of course read The Golden Notebook, but don't think I want to re-read it - seems like it was best read and appreciated in its time. MMcV suggested Balzac; for me, his work is all of a piece and no single novel, at least that I've read, stands out as a worthy selection in and of itself - maybe my shortcoming - fans will remember that Bob Dylan, who I believe is the world's greatest living artist, had words of praise for "Mr. B" in his memoir (also praise for Chekhov's stories). I considered two books that I really liked many years back: Look Homeward, Angel - which in high school was my favorite novel "of all time" - makes me afraid to re-read it - and Cosmicomics - again, I don't know how well it might stand up. My selection for the 100th spot: Carson McCullers's The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter - which may lead you to read her novellas and A Member of the Wedding as well. If I could get some do-overs, I can see a few that I might trim in favor of Doctor Zhivago or Robinson Crusoe. But let's leave the list as it stands:

-->

1.     Don Quixote. Miguel de Cervantes

2.     War and Peace. Leo Tolstoy

3.     Crime and Punishment. Fyodor Dostoyevsky

4.     Swann’s Way. Marcel Proust

5.     A Sentimental Education. Gustav Flaubert

6.     The Red and the Black. Stendahl

7.     The Magic Mountain. Thomas Mann

8.     Ulysses. James Joyce

9.     Light in August. William Faulkner

10.  A Farewell to Arms. Ernest Hemingway

11.  Mrs. Dalloway. Virginia Woolf

12.  Emma. Jane Austen

13.  Bleak House. Charles Dickens

14.  The Lady with the Little Dog and other stories. Anton Chekhov

15.  A Passage to India. E.M. Forster

16.  The Color Purple. Alice Walker

17.  Death Comes for the Archbishop. Willa Cather

18.  Invisible Man. Ralph Ellison

19.  The God of Small Things. Arundhati Roy

20.  The Leopard. Giusseppe di Lampedusa

21.  Confessions of Zeno. Italo Svevo

22.  Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage. Alice Munro

23.  The Hill Bachelors. William Trevor

24.  Cathedral. Raymond Carver

25.  The Age of Innocence. Edith Wharton

26.  Things Fall Apart. Chinua Achebe

27.  Tom Jones. Henry Fielding

28.  Museums and Women . John Updike

29.  American Pastoral. Philip Roth

30.  Fathers and Sons. Ivan Turgenev

31.  The Elephant Vanishes. Haruki Murakami

32.  The Crying of Lot 49. Thomas Pynchon

33.  Middlemarch. George Eliot

34.  A Turn of the Screw and other stories. Henry James

35.  A Month in the Country. J.L. Carr

36.  The Light in the Piazza. Elizabeth Spencer

37.  The Good Soldier. Ford Maddox Ford

38.  100 Years of Solitude. Gabriel Garcia Marquez

39.  The Bell Jar. Sylvia Plath

40.  Mr. Mani. A.B. Yehoshua

41.  Snow. Orhan Pamuk

42.  Snow Falling on Cedars. David Guterson

43.  To Kill a Mockingbird. Harper Lee

44.  Nine Stories. J.D. Salinger

45.  Lord Jim. Joseph Conrad

46.  Moby-Dick. Herman Melville

47.  The Scarlet Letter. Nathaniel Hawthorne

48.  Wuthering Heights. Emily Bronte

49.  The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Mark Twain

50.  A Separate Peace. John Knowles

51.  Lord of the Flies. William Golding

52.  Jane Eyre. Charlotte Bronte

53.  The Tin Drum. Gunter Grass

54.  Crossing to Safety. Wallace Stegner

55.  Mrs. Bridge. Evan S. Connell

56.  Metamorphosis and other stories. Franz Kafka

57.  The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Milan Kundera

58.  The Known World. Edward Jones

59.  Germinal. Emile Zola

60.  One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. Alexander Solzhenitsyn

61.  The Adventures of Augie March. Saul Bellow

62.  The Origin of the Brunists. Robert Coover

63.  Pale Fire. Vladimir Nabokov

64.  A House for Mr. Biswas. V.S. Naipaul

65.  The Power and the Glory. Graham Greene

66.  Lonesome Dove. Larry McMurtry

67.  The Golden Gate. Vikram Seth

68.  A Fine Balance. Rohinton Mistry

69.  The Great Gatsby. F.Scott Fitzgerald

70.  On the Road. Jack Kerouac

71.  Jude the Obscure. Thomas Hardy

72.  Beloved. Toni Morrison

73.  A Good Man Is Hard to Find. Flannery O’Connor

74.  A Worn Path. Eudora Welty

75.  A Crown of Feathers and other stories. Isaac Bashevis Singer

76.  Their Eyes Were Watching God. Zora Neale Hurston

77.  A Confederacy of Dunces. John Kennedy Toole

78.  So Long, See You Tomorrow. William Maxwell

79.  The Housebreaker of Shady Hill. John Cheever

80.  The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner. Alan Sillitoe

81.  Suite Francaise. Irene Nemerovsky

82.  The Heart Is a Lonely Hunger. Carson McCullers

83.  Bonfire of the Vanities. Tom Wolfe

84.  All the King’s Men. Robert Penn Warren

85.  The Executioner’s Song. Norman Mailer.

86.  The Haunting of Hill House. Shirley Jackson

87.  Go Tell It on the Mountain. James Baldwin

88.  The Grapes of Wrath. John Steinbeck

89.  The Sheltering Sky. Paul Bowles

90.  Gulliver’s Travels. Jonathan Swift

91.  1984. George Orwell

92.  Brave New World. Aldous Huxley

93.  Austerlitz. W.G. Sebald

94.  Frankenstein. Mary Shelley

95.  Ficciones. Jorge Luis Borges

96.  Atonement. Ian MacEwan

97.  11 Kinds of Loneliness. Richard Yates

98.  The Secret History. Donna Tartt

99.  Blood Meridian. Cormac McCarthy

100.                 Catch-22. Joseph Heller

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.