Crisp text let down by weak characterisation

IF ONE had to mention a singular feature which distinguishes Jhumpa Lahiri's style, it had to be her precise, concise prose, an ability she seems to have triumphed in with The Lowlands. The book’s prose is often self-consciously clipped. However, it manages to skirt being clinical and stays—in best parts—exceedingly intimate.

A simple summary of The Lowlands; it’s a story of brothers Subhash and Udayan Mitra growing up in Calcutta, with an age gap which makes them as good as twins, and just as inseparable.

“He was blind to self-constraints,” Lahiri writes about Udayan, “like an animal incapable of perceiving certain colors. But Subhash strove to minimise his existence, as other animals merged with bark or blades of grass.” Though the brothers excel in school, it is Subhash, the chemical engineer, who immerses himself in his studies, while Udayan becomes involved in the radical communist movement that springs up in India in the late 1960s. For the first time in is life, Subhash does not follow his brother’s lead and pursues his graduate studies in Rhode Island. As Udayan engages in revolutionary activities, Subhash completes his doctorate and reads occasional letters from Udayan in which the only significant development he reports is his secret marriage to Gauri. Circumstances force Subhash to return to India and he weds Udayan’s pregnant wife, Gauri, substituting himself for his dead brother and bringing up Bela as his own. The rest of the novel works as an examination of this one act and its consequences. The major limitation of The Lowland? Personally, it was Lahiri’s weak characterisations—especially of the character Gauri (though Lahiri devotes her maximum effort to bring her to life). Even at the end of the book, a reader might fall short of fully understanding why a woman so loved, and longed for, is rendered so incapable of feelings—not just maternal. She just is.

As usual, the themes of belonging and alienation, place and displacement, remains the leitmotif of Lahiri’s writing. In The Lowland, they seem more alive than before—especially thanks to the preciseness of the prose. However, one is constantly reminded and forced to compare Lahiri to her younger self, the one that penned The Interpreter of Maladies, a book that managed all this, and more, in terser language. Perhaps Jhumpa Lahiri works best in the tighter format of a short story?