The enduring power of brief encounters

IF THIS MONTH’S NOVELS have anything to connect them, it’s a sinuous, surprising manner of finding their way to us. Truth, or a wellmade untruth, will out.

Jhumpa Lahiri seemed to have gone a bit quiet after becoming the darling of the books pages in the early 2000s; her rich stories of Indian-American life appeared to have dried up. Now it looks as though two processes were at work: first, she was establishing a name as a Hofmann-level identifier and translator of superior Italian fiction and an editor of quality (her Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories is one of the best anthologies I’ve read).

But her new novel also shows an effort to reinvent her fiction as significant as that of Rachel Cusk, whose trilogy (2014-18) discarded traditions of character, plot and setting for something simultaneously austere and rich. Similarly, Lahiri has pared her work down to an autofictional core, whose calmness