His older brother Subhash, obedient and passive, goes to America and becomes a graduate student in Rhode Island.

He becomes involved in revolutionary politics and violence. Mercurial and daring Udayan is radicalised by his exposure to Marxism, which dovetails with his sympathies for the emerging Naxalite peasant insurgency. By university, however, they are pursuing very different paths. They spend a happy childhood sneaking into the local private golf club and listening to foreign broadcasts on a radio they build out of junk-shop finds. Udayan and Subhash grow up in the Tollygunge district of 1960s Calcutta. The Lowland tells the tale of two Calcutta brothers, the woman they each marry, and the child born into this unexpected triangle. But with her latest, Lahiri’s eye is languorous rather than patient, compulsively pointillist rather than sharp. To all of this, at her best Lahiri brings a sharp and patient eye. Along the way, Lahiri’s people imperfectly answer the duties of family life and the demands of cultural adaptation while struggling with personal longings inevitably at odds with both.

Lahiri’s previous work – a novel and two short-story collections – has earned her a Pulitzer Prize and all-but-unstinting praise, particularly for the elegance and precision of her prose, which attends to the melancholic experiences of middle-class characters moving back and forth in incident and recollection between India and the US. The Lowland, her Man Booker-longlisted fourth work of fiction, is an ambitious multigenerational intercontinental drama, but also a symptom of its author’s success. Jhumpa Lahiri would be a far better writer if she weren’t so bloody exquisite about her writing.

The lowland lahiri