Jhumpa Lahiri, whose Booker-shortlisted novel The Lowland follows two brothers torn apart by political conflict, talks to Gaby Wood.
In Jhumpa Lahiri’s new novel,
The Lowland, a young man newly arrived in Rhode Island from Calcutta is
invited to an anti-Vietnam protest. It is 1969, and the US has just become aware
of the My Lai massacre. He declines. “You’re not angry about the war?” his
American friend asks. “It’s not my place to object,” Subhash replies.
Subhash is keen to avoid activism; his brother Udayan has joined the
ultra-Leftwing Naxalite
movement in India, and he fears its
extremism. But more than that, he is aware how provisional his presence in
America may be. He remembers evenings in his youth, when he and his brother
would sneak into a colonial relic country club – a scene with which the novel
opens, and which sets in motion both Udayan’s commitment to resistance and
Subhash’s countering cautiousness. “This time he’d been admitted officially,”
Lahiri writes, “and yet he remained vigilant, at the threshold. He knew that the
door could close just as arbitrarily as it had opened.”
The Lowland is Lahiri’s second novel and fourth book. With her first,
The Interpreter of Maladies – a book of stories published when she was
just 30 – she won the Pulitzer Prize. Her first
novel, The
Namesake, was turned into a film by Mira Nair, and her second book of
stories, Unaccustomed Earth, became a bestseller as soon as
it was published. The Lowland is not yet in bookshops, and has already
been long listed for the Man Booker Prize, the short list for which will be
announced next week. You could say she is part of the establishment; yet she
still feels, she says, a little bit as though she is trespassing – and that
complicated cultural tread has given her fiction its world.
Raised in London, Boston and Rhode Island by Bengali parents, Lahiri’s family
were “foreigners in what felt like a very extreme way. Now I feel I have a guest
pass or something, and I can go in and out as I please, of this world, America,
which to me was always forbidden – more than that: impenetrable.”
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