Resurrected Review: The Namesake, by Jhumpa Lahiri

Resurrected Review: The Namesake, by Jhumpa Lahiri

by Rich Horton

This is a review of Jhumpa Lahiri's first novel, that I wrote back in 2006 or so. I should add that my potted bio below is obviously out of date. Lahiri has published more novels and stories since then, and, most notably, has lived in Italy since 2012, and has been writing it Italian, including a novel, Dove mi trovo (2018) (published in English as Whereabouts.) I haven't really kept up with her writing, except for the occasional story in the New Yorker, though I will say I quite enjoyed the most recent such story I saw.

So -- what I wrote in 2006 follows:

Jhumpa Lahiri was born in England, to Indian parents, and grew up in Rhode Island. So it is perhaps not surprising that her subject, so far, seems to be the problems of Indian immigrants in assimilating. (Or that one of the main characters in her first novel, The Namesake, is a woman born in England to Indian parents who grew up in Massachusetts and New Jersey.) This is a fertile subject area for interesting fiction -- but I have to say, I'm thinking maybe she should branch out a bit. [And I should add that she definitely has "branched out" since then!]

Her first book, the story collection Interpreter of Maladies, won the Pulitzer Prize. I first encountered her work with a story called "Gogol", in the New Yorker. I found it wonderful -- the best story published in the New Yorker that year. I soon learned that "Gogol" was an excerpt from a novel, her first, The Namesake, which was published in 2003 to considerable acclaim.

I have finally got around to reading the novel. And I have to say that it mostly lives up to my impression based on the short story -- but not quite fully. I suspect the problem -- a mild one -- is that Lahiri has not quite learned to structure a novel. The Namesake is somewhat episodic, and I don't think it is fully successful as a "novel" -- but as a reading experience it is ultimately quite satisfying.

It is in the main the story of the life (through early adulthood) of Gogol Ganguli, who is born in 1968 in Boston, to Ashoke and Ashima Ganguli. Ashoke is a Ph.D. student in Electrical Engineering at MIT. He and Ashima are Bengalis from Calcutta, and their marriage was arranged in traditional fashion. They have been in the US only a year or so when their child is born. His unusual first name is intended to be a nickname -- taken from Ashoke's favorite author. His grandmother is expected to suggest his real name, but her letter gets lost between India and the US, and they are forced to put Gogol on their boy's birth certificate.

The novel then takes several jumps to describe Gogol's life: his childhood, spent mostly in the US, with occasional long trips to India; his college career, at Yale and Columbia, where he becomes an architect; several love affairs -- in college with an American girl, then a strange sort of affair, including living together, with a very privileged American; then an affair with a married woman; and finally a semi-arranged relationship followed by marriage to another Indian -- a girl he had met as a child. Gogol -- who eventually does take a "real" name, Nikhil (related of course to Nikolai Gogol's first name) -- is a fully realized character, and very much an American born in the US with an identity split between his Indian heritage and his American life.

I liked it quite a bit, with as I have said some reservations about the overall structure. I also felt at times that some of the middle of the book, in particular, was a bit pat -- convenient -- things seemed to happen in Gogol's life to help the author make a point at times. But the ending is well done, and quite moving. Gogol himself is a wonderfully realized character, as are a couple others -- his mother, Ashima, for example, and also his eventual wife. Some of the other characters are a bit thin, not wholly convincing. The prose is excellent -- Lahiri is a very fine writer qua writer. And the general theme is well conveyed -- the conflicted desire, as I see it, of someone like Gogol to be fully American (as he surely is) but not to lose his heritage (a desire sometimes expressed more as rebellion tinged with guilt). And this is nicely contrasted with Ashima's situation -- she is really reluctant to move from India, and misses her home her whole life -- then by the end she is herself, we realize, as American as she is Indian.