The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri
Ruddy, Christopher
STRANGERS ON A The Namesake Jhumpa Lahiri Himghlon Mifilin. $24. 291 pp. Christopher Ruddy Hred Lynn and Jhumpa Lahiri likely have never heard of one another. Lynn, the former Boston Red Sox...
...The teenaged Gogol seeks in his new name "an alternative identity, a B-side to the self...
...How does-how can- one top that...
...anglicized family names mutated by colonization...
...Lynn, the former Boston Red Sox center-fielder, broke into the Major Leagues and helped lead his team to the 1975 World Series, where they lost in seven games, of course...
...Paul, Minnesota...
...This lack both saps her story of real drama and reveals the paucity of transcendence in Gogol's life: at thirty-two, he is a divorced architect, whose life and work have no apparent purpose, even to himself...
...Gogol-Nikhil's journey away from- and back toward-his Bengali roots largely follows his romances: Ruth, a Yalie from Maine...
...Christopher Ruddy is an assistant professor of theology at the University of St...
...An outstanding fielder who could hit for power and for average, he accomplished the then-unprecedented feat of winning both the Rookie of the Year and the Most Valuable Player awards in the same year...
...This restrained, but intense and generous exploration of human relationships recalls the Irish writer William Trevor...
...Both Gogol and Lahiri seem, in T. S. Eliot's words, to have "had the experience but missed the meaning...
...Tragedy need not be expressed brutally or py-rotechnically, but the reader needs more, for instance, than a cliched, lazy image of a divorced Gogol having fallen asleep while watching late-night television...
...On weekends, his suburban Massachusetts childhood is filled with large Bengali parties, as well as the music of Bob Dylan and The Who...
...She has all the talents one needs to become an enduring writer, but must see more deeply again...
...Just before leaving for Yale, he legally changes his name to Nikhil-he has grown to despise the seeming irrelevance and oddness of "Gogol"-and senses "how it feels for an obese person to become thin, for a prisoner to walk free...
...Named after Nikolai Gogol, the Russian author beloved by his father, he feels the twin pulls of his parents' heritage and of American culture...
...Lahiri's powers of description and dialogue are precise and revelatory, able to depict a person or place in an image or a phrase: the ramshackle elegance of Maxine's family's New Hampshire lakeside compound contrasts with the motels of Gogol's youth, where Bengalis "slept whole families to a single room, swum in pools that could be seen from the road...
...One of her first stories won the O. Henry Award and was included in the Best American Short Stories, while the New Yorker anointed her one of its twenty best young American fiction writers...
...This fluidity of identity finds further expression in Lahiri's use of trains...
...a suicide on the tracks that leads his father to reveal why he chose "Gogol" for his son's name...
...Lahiri shares his ability to evoke a place or event quickly, to convey the silences that haunt and strangle, to reveal gentle graces...
...Thomas in St...
...The great Russian writers so admired by Gogol's father and by Lahiri herself had tragedy in spades, and it was that exploration of irretrievable loss that made possible their visions of grace and redemption...
...Do I remind you of that night...
...Her first book, a collection of stories, Interpreter of Maladies, won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for fiction...
...Not at all," his father says eventually, one hand going to his ribs, a habitual gesture that has baffled Gogol until now...
...These failures, which form (along with Gogol's bonds with his parents) the heart of the novel, barely affect him...
...Gogol's meeting with his first girlfriend on Am-trak...
...With stories of love and dislocation set in Boston (and India), Jhumpa Lahiri has had a similarly spectacular debut...
...The Namesake, her first novel, should remove any doubts about her gifts...
...Cheap grace is no less deadly in literature than in religion, and Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies succeeded in large part because it portrayed such loss and gain with an honesty enhanced by its reserve...
...She also captures the quiet gratitude of life at its deepest: "Is [the wreck] what you think of when you think of me...
...pet" names, used only among families and friends...
...Is it merely coincidental that "Nikhil" and "nihilism" are similar...
...You remind me of everything that followed...
...Maxine and her parents, in particular, embody the cultured ease and self-absorption that is so different from his parents' practicality and sense of duty...
...Women come and go, relationships begin and end-even in divorce-but nothing of consequence is ever lost...
...Gogol asks him...
...That said, The Namesake remains a wondrous book, and I await her next...
...Her gift as a writer is to see clearly, acutely, generously, and to set such vision to lyrical prose...
...When, at the novel's close, he rediscovers the collection of Nikolai Gogol's stories given to him as a teenager by his father, the new self that begins to emerge rises not from ruins but from a blank slate...
...Her kinship to Trevor also reveals the major flaw in this otherwise excellent novel: where he is the master of subtle, if sometimes violent, tragedy, The Namesake is hobbled by Lahiri's failure to convey any tragedy in Gogol's romantic losses...
...Marked by a keen eye and ear, her bil-dungsroman follows Gogol Ganguli, an American-born son of Bengali immigrants, from birth to marriage and beyond...
...Train rides are passages between worlds and lives, and the author's characters are rarely the same when they disembark: Gogol's father's near death as a young man in an Indian train wreck...
...Likewise, when a hip professional couple from Brooklyn remark about possible baby names, "What we want is something totally unique," Lahiri lets their precious expressivism indict itself...
...The Namesake is a novel about identity and how names both confer and conceal selfhood: Bengali spousal names, so intimate they are never spoken...
...good" names, used in public...
...Maxine, a New York WASP from old, leisured money...
...and Moushumi, a Bengali family friend and NYU graduate student in French...
...It is a gift to see genius unfold before one's eyes...
Vol. 130 • December 2003 • No. 22
