Udayan is the rebellious, impulsive brother, who makes a series of reckless decisions that will affect everyone who loves him for decades to come. While the reader came to know these earlier people as distinct individuals, the characters in “The Lowland” seem to have been conceived as representative types with designated roles to play in a family melodrama constructed to underscore generational patterns of resentment and redemption, rootedness and freedom. Lahiri’s talent for capturing the small emotional details of her characters’ daily lives takes over, immersing us in their stories and making us less aware of the book’s creaky and often noisy hydraulics. It is initially hobbled, however, by pages and pages of historical exposition, by a schematic plotline and by a disjunction between the author’s scrupulous, lapidary prose and the dramatic, Dickensian events she recounts. Lahiri’s most ambitious undertaking yet, and it eventually opens out into a moving family story. Their marriage, though, will remain haunted by their memories of Udayan and a terrible secret Gauri keeps to herself. After his violent death (which happens fairly early in the novel), his devoted, dutiful brother, Subhash, marries his pregnant widow, Gauri, and brings her to America in hopes of giving her a new start in a new country. Udayan, an idealistic student in Calcutta in the 1960s, is drawn into Mao-inspired revolutionary politics. The premise of her new novel, “The Lowland,” in contrast, is startlingly operatic.

Jhumpa Lahiri first made her name with quiet, meticulously observed stories about Indian immigrants trying to adjust to new lives in the United States, stories that had the hushed intimacy of chamber music.

The lowland lahiri