I think the watchword for this book is “detachment” - detachment from home, detachment within a family, even various sorts of detachments from life. Even the prose emphasizes this theme, with the details doled out just as sparsely as the love between the characters. The feeling is very well-rendered but it’s a bit relentless, and it’s more than a little difficult to read such a monotonically ascetic and unaffectionate book. Nor does the happy ending really help - if anything it feels sudden and somewhat unrealistic.

Among the various forms of detachment, what’s most interesting is the detachment from time, the sense that time is moving in varying paces and directions for different characters. While Gauri’s life progresses through a series of achievements, she finds herself constantly reliving a single fixed point in the past. Subhash, while leaving that past behind, creates his own history - becoming, essentially, a living historical artifact at the end. His parents remain stuck in time, simply unable to progress beyond a singular traumatic event. It’s a fascinating device, one which almost bordered on the magical at one point before returning to the mundane.

I also enjoyed the various ruminations on water in its various forms - especially, the two tidal pools outside Subhash’s family home, symbolizing the close relationship between himself and his brother; and the ocean near Subhash’s home in Rhode Island, perhaps a more impersonal symbol of the unfathomable forces of history that sweep so many people along. Relatedly, this book that is so much about detachment from family focuses, appropriately enough, on the actual buildings in which these characters live. In particular it’s interesting to follow the progress of Subhash’s family’s home in Calcutta, which grows and changes along with his family.

If you’ve read one of Lahiri’s other books you’ll no doubt pick up on the common themes running through these stories - especially, the experience of Indian immigrants in America, the insidious effect of long-held family secrets revealed far later than they should have been, etc. As far as that goes, I enjoyed The Namesake quite a bit more than this book. I think The Lowland is trying to do something different… but still and all, I’d read The Namesake first, given the choice.