The Namesake: A Novel by Jhumpa
Lahiri
You'll Need A Box Of Tissues For This One
Any talk of The Namesake--Jhumpa Lahiris 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 Gogols 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 Gogols 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. Theres 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 ... shed 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. Theres
no cleverness or showing-off in The Namesake, just beautifully confident
storytelling. Gogols story is neither comedy nor tragedy; its simply that
ordinary, hard-to-get-down-on-paper commodity: real life. --Claire Dederer
Personal Review: The Namesake: A Novel by Jhumpa Lahiri
Here we have a novel that illustrates the power of fiction to deeply touch
the heart. I, an East Tennessee gal, identified so strongly with Lahiri's
protagonist, Gogol Ganguli, a second-generation Bengali guy, that by
book's end, I was a soppy, teary mess.
An interesting thing about this book for me was that I'm right around
Gogol's age. So much about his growing-up years was familiar from my
childhood, from Rubik's Cube to the TV shows that were widely shown at
the time. And oh yeah - like Gogol, I have an odd name (though I like
mine).
The story starts when Gogol's parents, Ashoke and Ashima, emigrate from
Calcutta to America and settle in Cambridge, Massachusetts, so Ashoke
can study engineering at MIT. Soon thereafter, Gogol is born.
When Ashoke and Ashima arrive in America, they must get to know each
other while they're getting to know their new country, for theirs was an
arranged marriage. And for years, Ashoke has been haunted by the
memory of a terrible train accident that nearly took his life. With him on the
train, he'd carried a book of short stories by the Russian writer, Nikolai
Gogol, and it was a page of Ashoke's favorite story, "The Overcoat," that
he was clutching when he was rescued.
Ashoke and Ashima had planned to give their son a name that Ashima's
grandmother promised to recommend, but since they need a name to put
on his birth certificate, Ashoke decides to call him Gogol, after his favorite
writer. Gogol will be his pet name, and he'll get his "good" name when the
grandmother's recommendation arrives. It's when Ashoke sees his son for
the first time that his haunting memories of the train accident begin to ease
their grip on his mind.
Ashima's grandmother has a stroke, and Gogol never gets his "good"
name. And as he grows up, his pet name, Gogol - and its oddness -
becomes a symbol for his being part of one culture (India - his parents')
and part of another (America) but not wholly in either one. He resents his

name more and more, as it seems to epitomize how he doesn't fit in
anywhere. On his fourteenth birthday, Gogol receives a gift from his father:
a beautifully bound volume of Nikolai Gogol's short stories. Young Gogol,
however, isn't impressed: he's more interested in the Beatles, so he
shelves the book and forgets about it. And when he grows up, he legally
changes his name to Nikhil.
Gogol's struggles between American culture and Indian culture is
personified, in his adulthood, by two women. The first is a woman from
Manhattan who attracts him because she and her wealthy, cosmopolitan
family are so different from his parents. The second, like Gogol, is a
second-generation Bengali - their parents are friends, and they'd grown up
together. I won't give anything away here, but I'll say that each relationship,
in its way, teaches Gogol something about himself and encourages him to
look within to find and articulate his personal truths about being a young
man torn between two worlds. It is these truths that form the raw material
of his hopes for his future.
The Namesake is a beautifully written novel - the characters, particularly
Gogol and his father - formed themselves in my mind like memories of
people I've known. The book is bittersweet and poignant and speaks,
simultaneously, of hope and regret, of life's beauty and its injustices.
It's worth noting, too, that Ashoke's favorite story, "The Overcoat", is about
a humble clerk who dies of fright after being upbraided by an Important
Person, only to get his revenge in the afterlife. Keep that in mind as you
read this wonderful book - it's a subtle but evocative metaphor that's a
central thread throughout.
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