When I told a friend I was
reading THE LOWLAND by Jhumpa Lahiri, she nodded with recognition and told me, “I
loved THE INTERPRETER OF MALADIES.” And I thought about it, but I didn’t
correct her because I wasn’t entirely sure. So I have that mark against me: I
can’t always tell apart our modern Indian female novelists.
When I picked up ELEANOR &
PARK it took me a couple of days to realize that the author is named after a
sushi favorite. I don’t think this affected my enjoyment of the book. I love
sushi.
Both of these novels deal with
the significance of small intimacies and sweeping acts of love. Eleanor and
Park are at that age where falling in love is immersive, cataclysmically
important, and confusingly pixelated into individual moments of connection:
liking the same song, holding hands on the bus, sharing earbuds. The novel’s
descriptions of how these moments feel were resonant and delicate, and the
overarching plot almost didn’t matter—Eleanor has an evil stepfather, a host of
pesky younger siblings, and a downtrodden, ineffective mother. Park’s father is
ex-military and wishes his son were more macho; his mom a Korean immigrant who
runs a beauty salon out of their garage and supports Park’s experimentation
with eyeliner. It’s not that these characters were stereotypes, but their
importance to the story was obviously secondary to the importance of Eleanor
and Park’s budding relationship, and nascent self-confidence driven by reliance
on one another. There are three models of co-dependency in the relationships in
this book, and like Goldilocks, one is too little, one is not enough, and one
is just right. I’m glad that young adults are reading this book, because Park
and Eleanor’s relationship is healthy and kind, supportive and daring and charming
and funny. Like THE FAULT IN OUR STARS of last year’s ToB, this is a teen
couple that makes me like teen couples, and it was a pleasure to read.
THE LOWLAND is so, so
beautifully written. Reading it felt like sinking into a nostalgic memory, and
following these characters’ lives from young childhood to old age gave a rich,
and very real, sense of their lives. The sensory descriptions of neighborhoods—a
swampland-adjacent cul-de-sac in India, seaside Providence, Rhode Island, and a
co-op in Brooklyn—were each so lovingly and particularly described that they
took on the grandeur of Paris or Bora Bora.
This loving care paid to places
and objects (books, furniture, food, paintings) is parceled out more
parsimoniously to characters. These characters desert each other at pivotal
moments—Udayan by not warning his young bride of the danger that he is in, and
the danger he puts her in to further his political gang; Gauri by leaving
Subhash, and her daughter, as soon as she has achieved her educational goals. The
reader is invited both to understand Gauri and to despise her; she is borne
along by a tide of male expectations for her as a wife, a mother, an Indian
woman, and a student, and finally seizes the opportunity to remake her life as
she wants it to be, even without romance and family, but she also treats her
new husband and her daughter in the most painfully dismissive way possible,
from the start, even as Subhash is giving her more opportunity than she could
have imagined as a young college student. Bela’s confrontation with her mother
over Subhash’s divorce papers is realistically harrowing. Gauri’s subsequent
despair-fueled visit to India shows even more vividly the ways in which she has
defined herself, and her world—in apposition to India, retaining comfort in its
culture and her memories, but in a position that India would not permit a woman
to be. If ELEANOR & PARK is about co-dependency in relationships, THE
LOWLAND is about the internal and external limits to a person’s satisfaction
with independence.
My winner: THE LOWLAND
ToB winner: ELEANOR & PARK
Yet again we disagree, Rooster.
Next week I’ll get into what I see as the unrealized possibilities of E&P
as a novel. Read the official ToB judgment here.
No comments:
Post a Comment