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Jhumpa Lahiri is first and foremost an author of short stories that are executed with the kind of exquisite craftsmanship to which an aspiring writer can return to again and again. The Lowland, however, is a novel, Lahiri’s second, and her most ambitious work to date. It is a dense, thoughtful and intricately structured tale grappling with philosophical questions of life, love, loneliness and the passage of time.
“She learned that an act intended to express love could have nothing to do with it. That her heart and her body were different things.”
Subhash and Udayan are brothers, bright, curious, born just a year apart in a 1940s Calcutta suburb. Although younger, Udayan is the leader, even his brother’s protector; he is the one with the ideas, the one who makes things happen. Gauri is a sharp-minded philosophy student who makes an unconventional ‘love’ marriage with Udayan that alienates her from her family just as Udayan is becoming heavily involved with the militant Marxist ‘Naxalite’ movement. Subhash, quieter, lacking his brother’s fierce convictions and adventurous nature, declines to follow Udayan on what is a dangerous political path and leaves India to pursue a PhD in Chemical Oceanography in Rhode Island.
A terrible event brings Subhash abruptly home, drastically and permanently reconfiguring the lives of this core trio. From here the story arches out to a whole life’s span, Lahiri reaching across generations and continents to map forensically the ripples of this incident as they pass through the fine web of relationships strung between. Lahiri is preoccupied with the nature of the threads that join us, with the profound influence other people have upon our experience of the world. In The Lowland she turns her focus to their absence, just as much as their presence – what it means to have an absent husband, mother or child, how our lives change course around the hole left by a loved one.
Returning as an official guest of the golf club into which he and Udayan could only creep, forbidden, as children, Subhash takes a photograph of his daughter Bela beneath a Banyan. It is:
“A tree that began life attached to another, sprouting from its crown. The mass of twisted strands, hanging down like ropes, were aerial roots surrounding the host. Over time they coalesced, forming additional trunks encircling a hollow core if the host happened to die.”
The Banyan tree serves as a metaphor for Subhash’s family and the whole narrative. At their point of origin is Udayan, the catalyst from whose actions the subsequent story sprouts, yet he is himself absent, the hollow at the core. Like the Banyan’s growth, the pattern is repeated – absences proliferating as relationships unfold.
Gauri worries that, preoccupied by her studies, she is not emotionally ‘present’ enough for her daughter; yet it is the years in which she is completely gone, when all that remains is a likeness in the shadows on the bedroom wall, that have the deepest effect on the person Bela later becomes. Her mother’s absence is “another language she’d had to learn, its full complexity and nuance emerging only after years of study, and even then, because it was foreign, a language never fully absorbed.”
“Amid the gray, an incongruous band of daytime blue asserts itself. To the west, a pink sun already begins its descent. The effect is of three isolated aspects, distinct phases of the day. All of it, strewn across the horizon, is contained in his vision.”
Distance and time, in the case of absence, are shown to be interchangeable. Whether a loved one is absent through death or because they are on the other side of an ocean is no matter when your home, newly extended in anticipation of a growing family, yawns empty every day as it does for Bijoli, Subhash and Udayan’s mother. To Subhash, wary of others’ influence upon Bela, Gauri feels more safely ‘gone’ on the other side of America than Udayan, whose influence seems fated to reach out over the years despite his passing.
Even between those in an apparently close relationship absences abound. As a child Udayan is characterised by his habit of vanishing; Gauri’s days revolve around leaving Bela unattended for as long as she dares. For Gauri this is a way of regaining some of the autonomy that motherhood has stripped from her life; presence/absence wielded as power. Later, Bela manages her (scant) presence in her father’s life as a means of exerting control, although “whether to deny herself or to deny him, she could not be sure”. Her nomadic ways take this further, absenting herself from her own life whenever it threatens to become settled in order to remain unbound by ties to people or places.
Lahiri points us to the essential solitariness of existence: for all our sense of connection to others, the lived reality is that the important people are as often represented by a symbol – a photograph, a shadow on a wall, a set of footprints in concrete – as they are by their physical selves.
Lahiri is an artful storyteller who works with extreme precision. Her eye for detail, and her ability to imbue those details with meaning and emotion, is laser sharp. The legacy of her short stories shines through in The Lowland in writing that is immensely concentrated. She seems to have taken a stylistic choice to carry her meticulous verisimilitude to the extreme, and the text has the feel of relentlessly pushing at its own boundaries in a bid to ensure a direct honesty to lived experience is given precedence over pleasantries of styling at all times.
“In a world of diminishing mystery, the unknown persists.”
The bare, exacting prose is uncompromising, verging on the brutal: every flourish, every turn of phrase or padding that a writer might employ to ease the reader in and smooth their passage through the book has been systematically pared back. Metaphors are firmly resistant to simplification for the sake of tidiness or symmetry – we are made to work at fully comprehending them – and her plotting is a masterclass in balance and restraint, so that the future of her characters is as anticipated yet as unknown as our own.
The steady focus upon such solitary existences – even when evoked in Lahiri’s finely sculpted and often hauntingly beautiful prose, in which every single word is made to count, can be at times exhausting; there is something to be said for ‘filler’ in longer fiction as a kindness to the reader, with the powerful sense of absence permeating the text making it at times a cold and bleak read.
Nevertheless, The Lowland is a formidably accomplished piece of work, which cements Lahiri as a writer who, as much as anyone else writing today, has something important to offer whatever form she is turning her hand to, not least in having constructed a voice that is so remarkably distinct.
The Lowland was published in September 2013. Buy it from Foyles.
About Kate Nowakowski
Kate Nowakowski is a writer whose previous work includes animation scripts, short stories, music journalism and literary review. She currently lives, writes and minds her small baby near Manchester, UK.
