In the Shadow of Gogol

...The seventh, where Ashoke was sitting, capsized as well, flung by the speed of the crash farther into the field...

...Tensions between cultural sacrifice and hard-earned material gain, restraint and perpetual adjustment, are familiar themes of immigrant tales...

...Both her stories and the novel recount the lives of Bengali immigrants and their American-reared children (like the author herself), and are composed in an understated, plain style...

...You remind me of everything that followed...

...Reluctantly, they break with custom and name their son Gogol—in gratefulness for Ashoke's surviving a catastrophic train wreck years before because rescuers spotted a page of "The Overcoat" falling from his fingers...

...Teleologically speaking," the professor declares, "ABCDs are unable to answer the question 'Where are you from?'" In his very name, Gogol sees all his parents' awkwardness, their otherness, and the limits he believes they place on him...

...This is Lahiri's writing at its finest...

...The very ordinariness of the challenges and achievements Lahiri outlines makes The Namesake a fresh and worthy contribution to this literature...

...Moreover, even as the novel progresses the writing becomes increasingly unpolished...

...He was true to the customs of his forefathers, and when he quarreled with his wife he used to call her a worldly woman and a German...

...But she fails to deliver on her promise to show how different Ashoke and Ashima would have been if they had never left Calcutta...

...and there are numerous descriptions ("wearingjeans and flip-flops and a paprika-colored shirt") that pile on the type of surplus information the Gogol of "The Overcoat" sends up...

...Their existence as foreigners, is a "perpetual wait, a constant burden, a continuous feeling out of sorts...

...The decision, like many of Ashoke and Ashima's daily experiences in America, illuminates their disconnection from their family, native country and traditions...

...They purchase a rake and shovel, shop for rice, walk laps daily around a manmade pond...

...This is a powerful exchange, a moment of intimacy that reveals its limitations...

...The assimilated son attends public schools and then Yale, works as an architect in Manhattan, falls in and out of love with women who are not of Indian descent...

...Several months ago, a tightly focused and graceful excerpt appeared in the New Yorker...

...Is that what you think of me...

...Not at all," Ashoke says...

...Over and over Gogol "realizes" one thing or another about his parents...

...Since we have now mentioned the wife, it will be necessary to say a few words about her, too...

...His eventual marriage to one of the Bengalis who used to attend birthdays and holidays at his parents' home, and his subsequent acceptance of all things Indian, reads like an unearned form of redemption, the answer to an equation...

...The sound was like a bomb exploding...

...Scenes of their yearly trips to India fall flat, and the goings on of the surrogate family they form with fellow Bengalis in the suburbs of Boston pale in comparison to relations between parents and children...

...Yet as Lahiri weaves together numerous narrative threads in the novel her ambitions crowd out the subtlety, structural intricacy and thematic resonance that garnered her short work so much praise...

...The first four bogies capsized into a depression alongside the track...

...Lahiri also devotes many pages to Gogol's failed romances, each a predictable lesson in his cultural education...

...After Ashoke explains the history behind his son's name, Gogol responds with tears and anger...

...This isn't Oedipus, or even Johnny Cash's "A Boy Named Sue...

...The fifth and sixth, containing the first-class and air-conditioned passengers, telescoped into each other, killing the passengers in their sleep...

...In the best stories in Interpreter of Maladies, unexceptional events and actions subtly acquire meaning for Lahiri's characters, whose lives are transformed by encounters that initially seem commonplace...

...Why haven't you told me this until now...

...With reserve and precision, she alternates between intimate shots of Ashoke and a newspaper-style account of the crash, elevating the episode's elements to an affecting pitch...

...In "The Overcoat," when the beleaguered copying clerk Akaky Akakievich seeks out a tailor to mend his shabby cloak, Gogol reflects on his own obligations: "Of this tailor I ought not, of course, say much, but since it is now the rule that the character of every person...

...Where Zadie Smith's chaotic romps through multicultural England teem with sketched characters and abundant wackiness, Lahiri's realism aims for the human and avoids easy cultural comedy...

...was Gogol...

...He is an "American-born confused deshi"—a phrase he hears from a sociologist at a college lecture...

...One of his lovers, for example, is simplistically presented as his wasp opposite: A wealthy New Yorker who "has never wished she were anyone other than herself," she "emulates her parents...

...Indeed, there are instances of muted poignancy in The Namesake as memorable as any in Lahiri's first book...

...Symbolic weight is arbitrarily ascribed to a flock of low flying pigeons, a square of sunlight, a robe "a size too small" that "is a comfort all the same...

...In The Namesake Lahiri, whose short fiction success is in large part due to a fastidious preciseness, succumbs to the rules Gogol was mocking...

...None of Gogol's failed relationships is rendered as effectively as those in Lahiri's earlier work...

...Nevertheless, a good story lies within the pages of The Namesake...

...The Namesake, by contrast, is too often heavy-handed and haphazard...

...Gogol's conflict with his parents gradually comes off as an extended adolescent phase, a selfcentered expression of individual uncertainty: "The only person who didn't take Gogol seriously, the only person who tormented him, the only person chronically aware of and afflicted by the embarrassment of his name...

...respects their tastes and their ways...

...Here is Lahiri's account of the father riding a train to visit his grandfather and rereading the copy of Gogol's stories he had given him: "Ashoke was still reading at two-thirty in the morning, one of the few passengers on the train who was awake, when the locomotive engine and seven bogies derailed from the broad-gauge line...

...must be completely described, well, there's nothing I can do but describe Petrovich too...

...In the early sections of the novel, Lahiri artfully illustrates the extent of this displacement as the Gangulis conduct their everyday affairs and slowly cobble together new lives as he settles into his academic career...

...Nor does she peddle personal tragedy, hipness or exoticism, let alone insulate herself with alternating blasts of irony and earnestness...

...The name cannot mean the same thing to father and son, nor can it eclipse the distance between the two...

...Each of its scenes emanated from the book's central event, the naming of the son of Ashoke and Ashima Ganguli, recent arrivals to Cambridge, Massachusetts, from India...

...The accident occurred 209 kilometers from Calcutta, between the Ghatshila and Dhalbumgarh stations...

...Soon after he legally changes his name to Nikhil, Ashoke tells him how he came to be named Gogol...

...As Lahiri repeats Gogol's gripes about his name and parents, once sharp and convincing emotional tangents become strained and less credible...

...Their pride stirs at the sight of Ashoke's name printed in a faculty directory...

...Do I remind you of that night...

...Reviewed by Benjamin Austen Assistant editor, "Harper's Magazine" "Wall came out from under Gogol's 'Overcoa.'" Thattip of the shapka to a fellow writer's brief masterpiece has been variously attributed to Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Leo Tolstoy and Ivan Turgenev...

...an entire chapter is told, jarringly and inconsistently, from the vantage point of his soon-to-be ex-wife...

...Lahiri's meticulous chronicling of Ashima and Ashoke's relocation is a prelude to Gogol's own cultural identity crisis...

...The child is born two weeks early, and the parents are pressured by their American doctors to fill out the birth certificate, even though the traditional Hindu "good name" for their child has failed to reach them from Ashima's grandmother in Calcutta...

...Despite the shortcomings of this novel, though, Jhumpa Lahiri remains one of today's most promising young talents...

...Jhumpa Lahiri—winner of the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for fiction with her first collection of stories, Interpreter of Maladies—goes the Russian greats one better by offering a full-length homage to Nikolai Gogol in her debut novel...

...They, in turn, "are secure in a way his parents will never be...

...Unlike many contemporaries who have won quick renown, she does not strive for cleverness, or promote quirky ventures for their sheer novelty...