-- Jeffrey Meyers

*

Brick Lane, A Novel; Monica Ali; Scribner: 374 pp., $25

Monica Ali takes us into the crooked, narrow streets of Brick Lane, London, a neighborhood crowded with Bengali immigrants, and follows the tight perspective of Nazneen, a Bangladeshi immigrant woman who comes to a slow awakening. "Brick Lane" is an earnest tale of female empowerment with some of the spirit of the popular British film "Bend It Like Beckham," only "Brick Lane," as a novel should be, is better and deeper, with great flair and sensitivity. Though the novel is seemingly narrow in focus, that confinement creates an atmosphere of impacted intelligence and power, the sentences jammed up, idiosyncratic, full of marvelous insight, as if the author has crammed all her novelistic ambition into Nazneen's head.

"Brick Lane" is a tender, traditional immigrant tale wherein strong, silent women prove to be the real backbone of family. This is an old story but a durable one, and fortunately Ali makes it fresher by investing each emotional turning point with Nazneen's own brand of patient compassion. This is fiction that is at once sophisticated and innocent, premodern and postmodern -- and above all, compassionate and entertaining.

Marina Budhos

*

Collected Poems; Robert Lowell; Edited by Frank Bidart and David Gewanter; Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 1,186 pp., $45

Robert Lowell died in 1977, so there has been a rather extraordinary delay -- a quarter of a century -- in publishing his "Collected Poems," remarkable considering that Lowell was nothing less than the most renowned, most lauded, most influential poet of his day, the last to command the public stage, to be featured on the cover of Time and to be called, by one critic, "the greatest poet writing in English." But the delay -- having allowed the melodramatic dust of the life to settle -- has resulted in an edition as unfashionably, ruthlessly serious as the poet himself, one he doubtless would have appreciated. Edited by Frank Bidart and David Gewanter, it features an unusually elaborate scholarly apparatus for a collected work: notes, chronology, bibliography, even a glossary. The magnitude of Lowell's achievement -- an achievement won against horrific odds -- can now come fully and magnificently into view. "We only live between / before we are and what we were," Lowell once wrote, but his work in this "Collected Poems" stands secure, timeless, outside the relatively brief span that was his bedeviled life.