The failure, however, is not a general one aspects of the novel that are less connected to the political movement do not fare as poorly.
Naxalism is the catalyst for the plot, and her characters’ actions are often shaped by the movement, but because Lahiri herself cannot muster much sympathy for her characters, the affective is hollowed out of political meaning and the central characters denuded of a compelling structure of motivation. Lahiri, remarkably skilled at mapping the tapestries of emotions, flounders here in the construction of compelling characters. She has little writerly investment in the ethos and spirit of the political culture she chooses to depict, exhibiting neither imaginative curiosity about that era and its politics, nor genuine sympathy for the cause that motivates some of her characters. No, Lahiri’s failure in The Lowland is not one of style, but of sensibility. But her first novel, The Namesake, does not suffer from this supposed shortcoming, so that explanation remains unconvincing. The single reason that is sometimes cited is Lahiri’s inability to translate her mastery of the short-story form into that of the novel. None, however, has identified the cause for this failure in an otherwise extraordinarily skilled writer.
Like Lahiri’s earlier work, The Lowland made a splash as a finalist for both the prestigious Man Booker Prize and the National Book Award for Fiction, and yet, almost every major review of the novel has remarked on the stagnant quality of the narrative, the flat, detached characters, and the tepid pace. She steps out of the sphere of navel-gazing immigrant fiction and frames the novel with a political movement of which she has no experiential knowledge. Indeed, prior to The Lowland, her fiction has been almost exclusively an engagement with immigrant angst in its many hues.įor The Lowland, partly set in Calcutta in the sixties and seventies, during the throes of the Maoist Naxalite movement, her ambitions are of a different order. Of what she knows, she writes masterfully. Yet, growing up with parents for whom home would always be elsewhere, she gets the immigrant experience, especially its melancholia.
Her writing is free of the exotic.Ī second-generation immigrant, she is firmly grounded in the culture in which she was raised. Unlike them, she does not brandish her immigrant status as an epistemologically superior vantage point, nor is she anxious to prove herself as a worthy native informant. After all, she has refreshingly little in common with diasporic writers like Salman Rushdie, Bharati Mukherjee, or Chitra Divakaruni. Her discomfort with the label is understandable. Jhumpa Lahiri does not like to be categorized as an immigrant writer, and her latest novel, The Lowland, is her strongest argument against that pigeonhole.
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