Author: Jhumpa Lahiri
Title: The Namesake

After I read an excellent book, rushing into another one seems like a betrayal. I find myself now at a time I normally read, yet unwilling to pick up even a newspaper, reluctant to diminish the novel I have just finished. The Namesake is one of the best books I have read in a long time. Part of its appeal is personal, as it concerns an Indian immigrant family in the United States, primarily the son, Gogol. Mostly, though, it's just a well-written, nuanced, and affecting story.

The story of Gogol and his family is so achingly familiar at times as to almost seem like reading a biography of myself. For example, as a student, I often had to deal with substitute teachers struggling with my name on the roster, to the point that I could tell by the significant pause and look of consternation when they got to me on the list, announcing my presence prematurely rather than subject them and (more importantly) me to the awkward agony of attempting my name. I'ts not all so specific, of course. Gogol and I have a complex relationship with the land of our parents' birth. We are neither fully American nor fully Indian, so India and all things Indian seem at once familiar and alien.

Such a result is obvious with second-generation Indian-Americans, but a similar phenomenon is found in the first generation as well. They grow accustomed to the more sedate, sane way of American life. For them, India will forever live in the 1960s, as occasional visits cannot disturb the weight of memory. Their friends and family age and die, their old haunts grow unfamiliar and change in strange ways, and they realize that what they thought for so long as their home is no longer. However, their new home can never fully replace it, either, as their formative years were spent in a different place, so its ways will never seem fully natural.

Naturally, with parents and children staring at each other from opposite sides of a cultural chasm, the generation gap only magnifies the potential conflict. The parents' natural tendency is to try to raise their kids as they have been raised. There is the obvious cultural clash, but there are deeper, fundamental incompatibilities between how people lead their lives that make the old ways unsuitable. What works living with an extended family, in the same neighborhood as your birth, where nobody drives, and where few people move more than a hundred miles from home is hardly suited to most of the United States. These conflicts are common to many immigrant families, and underlay much of the progression of the story.

Not all the themes are about Indian-ness, however. Some are more universal, or at least more American. There is the slow murder of the soul in the lonely suburbs. There is the emptiness of loss that can never be filled. We see the slow corrosion in a relationship from tiny differences leading to sudden breaks, and the insensibility of attraction. The story is inextricably meshed with the experience of Indian-Americans, but is accessible to all.

I am pleased that I found such an engaging book so soon after resolving to read more literary books. I highly recommend it. I suggest reading it soon, as the Namesake will be in theaters this September, and you don't want to be one of those people who reads a book after a movie about it comes out, right?

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