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Reviewed by:
  • The Namesake
  • Nathan Oates
The Namesake by Jhumpa LahiriHoughton Mifflin, 2003, 291 pp., $24

Readers of Jhumpa Lahiri's Pulitzer Prize-winning collection of short stories, Interpreter of Maladies, will find many of the same themes—immigration, assimilation, travel—as well as the same reticent elegance that made those stories so remarkable, in her new novel, The Namesake. As with her short stories, Lahiri's novel is at once expansive and intimate, [End Page 177] never stooping to noise or flash, instead focusing its energy on the creation of a wide cast of characters who are touching, complex and profoundly human.

The Namesake tells the story of Go-gol Ganguli, a first-generation Indian American. The novel begins in 1968, before Gogol's birth, when Gogol's father, Ashoke, is nearly killed in a train disaster in India. His father is rescued from the wreckage because "he was still clutching a single page of 'The Overcoat,' crumpled tightly in his fist, and when he raised his hand the wad of paper dropped from his fingers." Years later, when Ashoke's wife Ashima gives birth to their first child, Ashoke names the boy Gogol, in honor of the writer who, in a way, saved his life.

Lahiri gracefully shifts the narrative focus from the Ganguli parents to Gogol as he reaches school age. Gogol struggles with his name, which he regards as absurd and inappropriate, as well as with his Bengali American heritage. The issue of culture—What constitutes it? Who is a part of which culture? Is Gogol Bengali, American or Bengali American?—permeates the novel, from the early dislocation of immigration in the first half of the novel to Gogol's departure from home to Yale University.

This transition is marked by Gogol's decision to change his name to Nikhil, the formal name his parents had chosen for him as a child, which had never stuck. Gogol's college experience in one way resembles what might be called typical: he falls in love and loses it; he discovers architecture; he begins to assert, against his parent's desires, his independence and individuality. And yet his experiences are always complicated by the particular, as in any life. Gogol can never, even when he moves to New York to work in a large architecture firm, shake his past, his culture or his name as he wishes to do. He moves through a number of relationships of varying quality and eventually marries, much to his surprise, a Bengali woman he knows from his childhood. What Gogol wants is to be his own person, and the novel exposes the fallacy of the American myth of self-creation.

The novel ends with Gogol in his early thirties in—as is always the case in this novel—a state of flux. Although the novel never feels busy or hectic, the characters are always in transit. The plot's unfolding resembles the flow of life: various, full and at times chaotic; at the same time, the narrative remains always anchored in the perceptions of its characters. Here is Gogol, on a train ride to visit his parents' home: "Abandoned factories, with rows of small square windows partly bashed in, ravaged as if by moths. On the trees the topmost branches are bare, the remaining leaves yellow, paper-thin. The train moves more slowly than usual and when he looks at his watch he sees that they are running well behind schedule."

The novel works in the style of William Trevor, never removing us from the characters' experience of the world, so the characters' thoughts feel as natural as our own. Lahiri's elegant prose guides us through their lives. Toward the end of the novel Gogol's mother, Ashima, thinks, "They are not willing to accept, to adjust, to settle for something less than their ideal of [End Page 178] happiness. That pressure has given way, in the case of the subsequent generation, to American common sense." The perpetual tensions be-tween cultures, between individual minds, between the mind and the world beyond it, run through this empathetic, beautiful novel.

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