The Namesake: A Novel
by Jhumpa Lahiri
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Book Summary Information
Author: Jhumpa LahiriEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2004-09-01
ISBN: 0618485228
Number of pages: 291
Publisher: Mariner Books
Book Reviews of The Namesake: A Novel
Book Review: Gogol Finds His Overcoat
Summary: 5 Stars
As a teacher, I often think about the importance of narrative, in our lives, in our playing of classical music, in my own explanations, in literature. There is a power in the story, in the plot, in the narrative, its own lifetime and the vicarious experience it affords us, if we read it, listen to it, play it, live through it.
In The Namesake, by Jhumpa Lahiri, the hero of the story is named Gogol, after the Russian author. Once she named him this, Ms. Lahiri associated herself with a great tradition of literature, of narratives that describe life in their aching compeleteness, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Gogol. In her story, Gogol is a young Indian-American man. She assiduously refuses to give in to the temptation of creating an actual plot (some readers have complained that nothing happened); but that is deliberate, that is the point. As a bard, a Storyteller, Ms. Lahiri has undertaken a much more difficult task than merely entertaining; here she is allowing us to walk along with Gogol, through his marvelous life, unencumbered and unbeholden to a storyline.
We go along with him through his life. We are often his only friend, his stand-in family member. For example, when he is eighteen we go with him to a Massachusetts courthouse to change his name. We are with his parents before he is born, when they are young adults and lost. We watch him conduct his first affair in college and its inevitable end. I love the way the book often telescopes time: we are informed of the end of the affair (and many events through the book) in one sentence. The time intervening, the arguments, the tearing of hair, the loss of sleep, is bypassed. Its absence says yes, this happened, but that's only one small thing in his life, here's more. (Although I must say that if the author were a man, I don't believe he could portray the end of a character's first love with such surgical cleanliness. Perhaps that is just me.)
Then we see Gogol find a tenement apartment in New York, fall in with and in love with the glamorous Waspy woman. He falls in love with more than the woman, but with her family, her, their summer cottage, their breezy, waspy, Middle-American non-nonjudgementalism, their sophisticated conversations about the latest topics dujour and open-minded attitude toward their daughter sleeping with a man outside of marriage in their own home (a townhouse in Chelsea- she lives on the top floor, the parents on the second, they eat and talk on the first floor). Gogol dreads taking her to visit his own family, their nervous comments about driving safely, their eating with mouths "not entirely closed," their humble suburban ranch decorated as such. We realize, slowly, that he is disconnecting from himself, his values, his past. The mastery of Lahiri's storytelling is partly in the fact that she never comes out and parodies the woman's family (this will never be made into a comedy a la MEET THE PARENTS). There is never anything overtly negative about them, except that they are vaguely the sort of urban sophisticate-twits that can be annoying if taken in too large a dose. Instead, one realizes that Gogol is leaving himself in order to become part of her family, leaving his apartment, not answering calls from his family; he is taking a misstep. When they are at the summer cabin, they celebrate Gogol's birthday. The other waspy, affluent and slightly disinterested homeowners join them at the picnic table by the lake. Her family makes a comment about something in Gogol's culture, gets it almost but not quite right, asks Gogol with minimal interest to confirm it, and the listener barely acknowledges. When the dinner is over, they all shuffle back to their own affluent, disconnected existences. Gogol imagines how his birthday would be celebrated with his own family- the countless family friends and cousins and aunties and uncles, all talking and yelling and laughing, most sitting on the floor with paper plates, devouring the feast that his mother would have spent days preparing. They would eat with their hands and chew vociferously, loving the food. They would all ask questions about Gogol and speculate on his life and fortunes. They would be the same crowd that celebrated all of his life events from his very birth. We as readers have already been to these parties, have been warmed by them, made hungry by the food descriptions, been happy for Gogol's mother, who had been lonely as a professor's wife in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Now we sit at the lake by the cabin, slightly worried for Gogol, wanting to shout to him to Run, Run back to his parents who chew loudly, his father who dresses badly. Though his would be in-laws will die surrounded by the right Toys and having seen the right exhibits, they will also die without having had the same roaring crowds that populated and enriched Gogol's life. But Gogol's family dies sometimes alone and in empty apartments but with the echo of their last party in their ears. We also know this firsthand, being present at his father's death, which happens in a practically vacant apartment that he rents while at another university for a year. Gogol goes to collect his father's remains and belongings, and we accompany him into the plain apartment complex, into the kitchen where the cupboards have only a few items, into the bedroom with just a few sets of clothes, into the living room with only a tv and a chair, etc. He realizes his father had died without comfort or family, in the cold of winter, in fact without his jacket. Here Ms. Lahiri might be alluding to Gogol's The Overcoat, in which the hero ventures into a Moscow winter, loses his coat and dies on the street, alone.
But the phrase "alluded to" sounds so academic, like something one might write into a blue book to get extra points- this is real life, real narrative- she is bringing the father's narrative close to that of the his literary hero, Gogol, and close to the life and narrative of the character Gogol, and to our own lives and narratives. For don't we all rush out into the wild blizzard, alone, really, despite our family's best efforts, and veering here and there, toward and away from ourselves and what is right for us? For the story here is just that, but that cannot be told in a few words, it must be lived through, and to allow the reader to live along with Gogol, a specific story cannot be told, only his life and rushing out into the snow can be told, one misstep after another.
This morning the author of READING LOLITA IN TEHRAN recited an essay on the radio about empathy and the power of literature. She told about her own expulsion from Tehran University for teaching certain forbidden authors, including Mark Twain. She said she had been surprised that her only supporters were two of her graduate students who were hardcore conservatives and who had always debated with her against women's rights and other progressive ideas. When she ran into them later, she asked them why they stood by her. They referred to a scene in HUCKLEBERRY FINN, which they had read in her class, in which Huck lets Jim, the slave free. Huck, she explained in her essay, had been told in Sunday school that he would suffer the fires of damnation if he ever let a slave go free, but after he spent time with Jim, laughed with him, had advnentures with him, he could only see him as a human being, as a friend, and Huck therefore decided he could accept Hell if it meant letting his friend go. These radical fundamentalist students, in the face of pressure from authority, decided that they could also face the fires of their particular afterlife, if it meant standing by their teacher. Her point was sharp and true to its target: that media can report about AIDS patients in Africa, bombs killing innocents in Iraq, or other topical disasters, but literature can "provide the shock of recognition," as in Huck Finn, that can create empathy in the listener or reader.
In the Namesake, Gogol's father rushed into his own blizzard, accepting a post at MIT, leaving behind his culture, bringing his wife to a country that she never quite adopted, hearing about each successive relative's death by phone instead of in person. But he kept his Overcoat, his family, himself, and his favorite author, Gogol, close to him. Only in the literal did he die without his coat. Gogol, the son, is still rushing as we leave him, but he does find his Overcoat, and that's all I will say about the ending. Please read this great work and you will then be able to begin to understand how to play or listen Brahms, if you don't already.
Summary of The Namesake: A Novel
Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies established this young writer as one the most brilliant of her generation. Her stories are one of the very few debut works -- and only a handful of collections -- to have won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Among the many other awards and honors it received were the New Yorker Debut of the Year award, the PEN/Hemingway Award, and the highest critical praise for its grace, acuity, and compassion in detailing lives transported from India to America. In The Namesake, Lahiri enriches the themes that made her collection an international bestseller: the immigrant experience, the clash of cultures, the conflicts of assimilation, and, most poignantly, the tangled ties between generations. Here again Lahiri displays her deft touch for the perfect detail -- the fleeting moment, the turn of phrase -- that opens whole worlds of emotion.
The Namesake takes the Ganguli family from their tradition-bound life in Calcutta through their fraught transformation into Americans. On the heels of their arranged wedding, Ashoke and Ashima Ganguli settle together in Cambridge, Massachusetts. An engineer by training, Ashoke adapts far less warily than his wife, who resists all things American and pines for her family. When their son is born, the task of naming him betrays the vexed results of bringing old ways to the new world. Named for a Russian writer by his Indian parents in memory of a catastrophe years before, Gogol Ganguli knows only that he suffers the burden of his heritage as well as his odd, antic name. Lahiri brings great empathy to Gogol as he stumbles along the first-generation path, strewn with conflicting loyalties, comic detours, and wrenching love affairs. With penetrating insight, she reveals not only the defining power of the names and expectations bestowed upon us by our parents, but also the means by which we slowly, sometimes painfully, come to define ourselves. The New York Times has praised Lahiri as "a writer of uncommon elegance and poise." The Namesake is a fine-tuned, intimate, and deeply felt novel of identity.
The Namesake takes the Ganguli family from their tradition-bound life in Calcutta through their fraught transformation into Americans. On the heels of their arranged wedding, Ashoke and Ashima Ganguli settle together in Cambridge, Massachusetts. An engineer by training, Ashoke adapts far less warily than his wife, who resists all things American and pines for her family. When their son is born, the task of naming him betrays the vexed results of bringing old ways to the new world. Named for a Russian writer by his Indian parents in memory of a catastrophe years before, Gogol Ganguli knows only that he suffers the burden of his heritage as well as his odd, antic name. Lahiri brings great empathy to Gogol as he stumbles along the first-generation path, strewn with conflicting loyalties, comic detours, and wrenching love affairs. With penetrating insight, she reveals not only the defining power of the names and expectations bestowed upon us by our parents, but also the means by which we slowly, sometimes painfully, come to define ourselves. The New York Times has praised Lahiri as "a writer of uncommon elegance and poise." The Namesake is a fine-tuned, intimate, and deeply felt novel of identity.
Any talk of The Namesake--Jhumpa Lahiri's follow-up to her Pulitzer Prize-winning debut, Interpreter of Maladies--must begin with a name: Gogol Ganguli. Born to an Indian academic and his wife, Gogol is afflicted from birth with a name that is neither Indian nor American nor even really a first name at all. He is given the name by his father who, before he came to America to study at MIT, was almost killed in a train wreck in India. Rescuers caught sight of the volume of Nikolai Gogol's short stories that he held, and hauled him from the train. Ashoke gives his American-born son the name as a kind of placeholder, and the awkward thing sticks.
Awkwardness is Gogol's birthright. He grows up a bright American boy, goes to Yale, has pretty girlfriends, becomes a successful architect, but like many second-generation immigrants, he can never quite find his place in the world. There's a lovely section where he dates a wealthy, cultured young Manhattan woman who lives with her charming parents. They fold Gogol into their easy, elegant life, but even here he can find no peace and he breaks off the relationship. His mother finally sets him up on a blind date with the daughter of a Bengali friend, and Gogol thinks he has found his match. Moushumi, like Gogol, is at odds with the Indian-American world she inhabits. She has found, however, a circuitous escape: "At Brown, her rebellion had been academic ... she'd pursued a double major in French. Immersing herself in a third language, a third culture, had been her refuge--she approached French, unlike things American or Indian, without guilt, or misgiving, or expectation of any kind." Lahiri documents these quiet rebellions and random longings with great sensitivity. There's no cleverness or showing-off in The Namesake, just beautifully confident storytelling. Gogol's story is neither comedy nor tragedy; it's simply that ordinary, hard-to-get-down-on-paper commodity: real life. --Claire Dederer
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