Harvey Freedenberg

It’s been five years since the publication of Jhumpa Lahiri’s last short story collection, Unaccustomed Earth, and 10 since the release of her only novel, The Namesake. Thus, it’s understandable that expectations for her second novel are high. The Lowland, an intricately plotted, melancholy family drama that plays out over half a century in India and America, will more than reward readers’ patience.

Most of the novel’s Indian action takes place in an enclave of Calcutta called Tollygunge. From the first scene, when adolescent brothers Subhash and Udayan Mitra steal onto the grounds of the exclusive Tolly Club, their sharply different personalities emerge. By the time they reach their mid-20s, in the late 1960s, the brothers, separated by only 15 months, are launched irrevocably on divergent paths. Udayan, the younger, joins a Marxist-Leninist political movement called the Naxalites, while Subhash moves to Rhode Island to attend graduate school.

When Udayan’s marriage to the alluring and intellectually restless Gauri ends abruptly, the young woman marries Subhash and returns with him to the United States. Though the novel periodically revisits India, both in real time and in memory, much of the drama thereafter focuses on the unremitting tension that surrounds Subhash and Gauri’s attempt to adapt both to a marriage neither ever intended and to life in a foreign land, even as they raise a daughter, Bela, amid the shadows of their past.

From her earliest short stories, Lahiri has distinguished herself as a crafter of elegant, gently understated prose, a quality that marks this novel as well. In this work, as in her previous ones, she also displays her mastery of pacing. Whether she’s describing a confrontation between Udayan and the Indian police, or an equally devastating emotional encounter between Gauri and her adult daughter, Lahiri has an unerring knack for meshing dialogue, penetrating glimpses into the consciousness of her characters and precisely observed detail to create scenes of powerful drama. That exquisite control occasionally leaves one wishing for more rather than wondering, as often is the case with lesser writers, why the author has lingered over a scene too long.

The Lowland has been longlisted for the 2013 Man Booker Prize. It’s a deserving candidate, but in truth no prize is required to validate the achievement of a work whose beauty and pathos will reside in memory long after it has been read.

“I had a daughter and she died.” With those chilling words, Paul Harding’s new novel launches readers on a harrowing journey into the mind of a father wrecked with grief over the death of his teenage daughter in a bicycling accident.

Kate’s death quickly fractures Charlie Crosby’s already shaky marriage, and his wife flees the Massachusetts town that gives the novel its title to return to her family. Alone, Charlie spirals into an ever deeper despair, and Harding fully inhabits his psyche to paint a bleak portrait of nearly unremitting grief. Fueled by drugs and tortured by sleeplessness, Charlie spends his nights wandering through Enon’s cemetery, struggling to summon memories of his daughter—or as he says, “trying to follow her into the country of the dead in order to fetch her back.” Even nature, in the form of a hurricane, is congruent with Charlie’s profound sadness.

Relief comes intermittently through the judicious use of flashbacks, as Harding gently reveals Charlie’s relationship with Kate, his only child. We see them feeding birds from their hands and exploring the colorfully named landmarks of Enon, like Wild Man’s Meadow and Peters’s Pulpit. In these seemingly inconsequential moments, we understand the strength of the bond between father and daughter and the poignancy of a life ended violently and prematurely. Charlie realizes that Kate’s “short and happy life was the greatest joy in my own,” while understanding, paradoxically, that the same joy “was the measure and source of my grief.”

Charlie is the grandson of the main character of Harding’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Tinkers, who makes a brief appearance here. The stories are, however, also connected by a shared appreciation for the culture and history of small New England towns and a fascination with the natural world, as well as Harding’s affinity for dense, yet lyrical, prose.

Enon is a novel that is chiseled out of profound darkness. But Harding’s sensitivity in telling this difficult story makes reading it a rewarding, if sometimes painful, experience.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read a Q&A with Paul Harding for Enon.

How far would you go to rescue a sibling hurtling down the path to self-destruction? That’s the question Lionel Shriver poses in this bighearted novel about a sister’s battle to curb her brother’s epic ­overeating—a story that challenges some of our facile assumptions about weight, body image and the sometimes complicated daily encounter with one of life’s most mundane and sublime activities.

When down-on-his-luck jazz pianist Edison Appaloosa rolls into baggage claim at the Cedar Rapids Airport in an extra-wide wheelchair, his younger sister Pandora Halfdanarson is left nearly speechless. In the four years since she’s last seen him he’s added more than 200 pounds, a weight gain so massive he’s lost three inches of height. Pandora and Edison share the burden of a difficult past, as children of a father who once starred in a now long-forgotten television drama that blurred the boundary between real life and fantasy for both of them.

Edison settles in for an extended visit. From the first, his presence provokes conflict with Pandora’s husband, an obsessive cyclist and “nutritional Nazi” who gazes in horror on Edison’s feats of consumption. On the eve of her brother’s departure from Iowa, Pandora, the creator of a wildly successful line of snarky customized pull-string dolls called Baby Monotonous, decides to abandon her family and move into an apartment with Edison to manage his radical, nearly life-threatening weight loss program.

The second half of the novel traces the rocky course of that experiment. As Edison’s weight falls, his self-esteem rises, but Pandora, who has her own tangled relationship with food, must also struggle with the toll her choice of brother over husband and teenage stepchildren exacts on her family. Making effective use of the intimate, almost claustrophobic, settings of her novel, Shriver consistently delivers whip-smart, often witty dialogue and pungent character insights that add powerful momentum to what, at its heart, remains a simple story.

Only a writer of Shriver’s talent and courage would attempt a denouement as daring as the one that plays out over the novel’s final 15 pages. She succeeds by creating something that does much more than tie up plot threads and usher her characters off the stage. Instead, she makes us appreciate anew how profound the emotional and psychological issues of family and food are, deepening our empathy along with our admiration for the unquestionable skill she displays in doing it.

The subject of Ken Kalfus’ startlingly original third novel—a bizarre 19th-century attempt to communicate with the planet Mars from the Egyptian desert—couldn’t be more remote from his first two, the death throes of Czarist Russia and the uneasy world of post-9/11 New York City. That he’s able to carry it off with such gusto is a tribute to both his versatility and the considerable breadth of his imagination.

As the summer solstice approaches in 1895, fever-stricken British astronomer Professor Sanford Thayer desperately urges his chief engineer Wilson Ballard to galvanize a workforce of 900,000 sullen and occasionally mutinous Arab fellahin. Their task is to complete the excavation of a vast equilateral triangle, 306 miles and 1,663 feet on each side (precisely 1/73 of the Earth’s circumference at that latitude in the western Egyptian desert). At the moment Earth reaches its farthest point from the sun on June 17, Thayer’s plan is to ignite the oil-filled trench, hoping to send a signal to what he believes is the far more advanced Martian civilization and begin a dialogue between the two planets.

For such a brief novel, Equilateral overflows with intrigue and action, featuring duplicitous despots and feckless politicians, bands of marauding desert warriors and a nearly wordless love story between the obsessed astronomer and the young Arab girl who attends to him in his desert outpost. Though Kalfus often paints in broad strokes, he succeeds in investing characters like Thayer and his devoted private secretary Adele Keaton, among others, with a depth that engages us fully in their bizarrely inspiring quest.

Kalfus nicely balances a fast-paced plot with consideration of the big themes that lurk under the surface of the story: the notion of progress, the arrogance of empire, the audacity of science and the tension between pure research and the demands of commerce. There’s an equally impressive equilibrium between the undeniable daffiness of this imaginary project and the serious invitation to ponder a question that occurs to many of us when we gaze into the clear night sky: Is there anyone out there?

Jim Crace’s 11th novel is a remorseless allegory exploring the dark side of what we think of as economic progress, as it rudely elbows aside settled ways of life.

Harvest is set in an English farming community inhabited by barely 60 souls and known only as “the Village,” in an indeterminate time whose subtle clues seem to place it in the 17th or 18th century. The village finds itself the victim of the enclosure movement that soon will turn common lands used for barley farming into private property, where tenants raise sheep for the benefit of a ruthless and domineering landowner. After the dovecote of Master Kent, the landlord’s agent, is destroyed in a suspicious fire, three strangers, themselves refugees from a neighboring village, are summarily and wrongfully accused. The two male members of the trio are confined in the village’s pillory, while their female companion disappears into the night like a lifting mist. Over the next week, Walter Thirsk, Master Kent’s former manservant and now one of the village’s farmers, describes how this intemperate act seems to provoke the unraveling of the community’s simple existence.

Thirsk’s pained and plainspoken narrative voice tugs the reader along as the story becomes more bleak and violent and the depth of the villagers’ tragedy is slowly revealed. There are the deaths of humans and a beloved horse, the arrest and torture of several villagers and suspicions of betrayal and even sorcery. Thirsk watches these events with rising dismay as he describes the fear, paranoia and bewilderment of his fellow villagers, who understand the placid, if often difficult, life they’ve shared is coming to an end. “It feels as if some impish force has come out of the forest in the past few days,” he observes, “to see what pleasure it can take in causing turmoil in a tranquil place.”

Harvest invites comparison to stories like Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery,” and even the work of Stephen King, if without some of their narrative pyrotechnics. Though its climax isn’t quite equal to the sense of foreboding Crace patiently builds throughout the novel, it’s fully consistent with the story’s elegiac tone. As he did in his National Book Critics Circle award-winning novel Being Dead, Crace demonstrates his consummate skill at creating and sustaining a mood that moves relentlessly from unease to outright dread.

Ian McEwan’s new novel is a stylish and sexy morality play set in the world of British espionage of the early 1970s. If it doesn’t have quite the intensity of Atonement, it’s still a smart, entertaining story that explores the boundary between truth and fiction, in both life and stories.

Recruited by an older lover into little more than a glorified clerical job with MI5, Serena Frome is a young Cambridge grad whose indifference to the mathematics she studied there is matched only by her love for reading. It seems fitting that she’s enlisted in the “Sweet Tooth” program, posing as the representative of a foundation that encourages unsuspecting writers to produce stories that portray the Soviet Union and its allies in a negative light. Serena is assigned to recruit journalist and aspiring novelist Tom Haley into that group. Unsurprisingly, their business transaction quickly evolves into an intense love affair.

The ethical conundrum that lies at the heart of the story comes into focus when Tom’s dystopian, anti-capitalist novel brings him a prestigious prize. Serena is caught between her handlers’ distaste for Tom’s literary product and her fear that the truth of what brought them together will be exposed, disgracing him and abruptly ending her career. As she gropes for a way out, it becomes clear she’s as much a creator of fictions as her lover.

Alongside his engaging plot McEwan does a capable job sketching a portrait of Britain’s bleak economic and political circumstances in this era. The country reels from the shock of the Arab oil embargo, the damage compounded by labor unrest in the coal-mining industry. To conserve scarce energy Serena’s work week is reduced to three mind-numbing days in a damp, chilly office. McEwan also pokes gentle fun at the desiccated quality of the spy game of the time, reduced long before the fall of the Berlin Wall to little more than bureaucratic wrangling, while the looming threat of terrorism is glimpsed dimly at best.

In her reading, Serena longs for “characters I could believe in,” hoping “to be made curious about what was to happen to them.” McEwan has supplied a worthy collection of such characters in Sweet Tooth, a spritely portrait of the malleability of fact and fiction.