The Namesake

Gogol Ganguli, born in the U.S. to Bengali parents, hates his name.  He cannot understand what possessed his parents to saddle him with such an odd and seemingly-irrelevant name, and he spends his early adult years trying to reinvent himself.  His parents, meanwhile, have gone through a reinvention of their own, having left their extensive family circles in Calcutta to raise their two children in the suburbs of Boston among the ex-pat Bengali community; but they never really expected their children to become Americans.

Jhumpa Lahiri weaves their stories in The Namesake with the compassion and exquisite texture that earned her the Pulitzer for her first story collection, Interpreter of Maladies (I reviewed it here).  Like that collection, this novel brings to the fore the sharp aches and joys unique to the immigrant experience, and by extention, the human experience: family, belonging, identity.  Her portrayal of the Ganguli family is richly-layered, intimate, spanning three decades and incorporating a gallery of sympathetic characters. 

In some ways the novel feels like one of her always-stunning short stories greatly expanded — which seems to me both a compliment and also something of a criticism.  Lahiri is at her best in painting sharp, fixed portraits resonating with personal and interpersonal details, a strength which lends itself perhaps more to the short fiction form.  Here, she hones in on various episodes in Gogol’s (or his mother’s or father’s) life, producing an intimate portrait of the character at that moment, and then scans over the next months or years to another significant episode.  It’s a method that allows for highly-detailed close-ups of the characters — each so well-crafted that you feel you really know this person — but it also produces a strange sense of distance from the action, like falling out of touch with a friend and then suddenly finding yourself in the middle of his/her life again after five years, and then again five years later, and then again five years later.  Perhaps the problem is simply that the characters are portrayed so convincingly and sympathetically that I am annoyed to miss stretches of their lives — which is why I can’t decide if I’m criticizing or complimenting!

Overall, The Namesake is an excellent novel (making me curious about the film, which just arrived from Netflix).  I didn’t react to it as strongly as I did to Interpreter of Maladies for the reasons above, but because her work is so consistently solid, I am looking forward to exploring her latest story collection, Unaccustomed Earth. 

I’d love to hear from other Lahiri readers — did you have a similar experience to mine with this novel?  Do you like the novel better than the stories, or vice versa, and can you put your finger on why? 

06. March 2009 by Mindy
Categories: Reviews, Your turn | 3 comments