Cheryl's Reviews > The Namesake

As I read this book, a Mexican-American family sold their home across the street from mine, and an Italian-American couple moved in three houses down. With the book still open on my lap, somewhere in New York City, while walking and talking on her cellphone, my mother laid out a plan for me to help her find a place that was close to her friends from 'back home,' but still somewhere around city amenities. I was immediately forced to consider how my mother is similar to Ashima, the matriarch of her family who is the thread that keeps custom and family together.

In this uniquely woven narrative, Lahiri toys with time and details. The prose is so direct and descriptive that it fosters imagery that turn characters into fully-fleshed humans on the page. You have the feeling that every detail has been lived, that the writer has done some thorough observations of the smallest thing, like restaurants on Fifth Avenue and how much specific hats cost, that she has lived in the Ivy League academic circle, that she has struggled with issues of assimilation. Some of the reviews I've read, frankly, make me cringe from the ignorance. It's one thing to write about one's reading experience, another to harshly attack credibility. No wonder Lahiri wrote that she never reads reviews.

This may not have been her Pulitzer-winning piece (Interpreter of Maladies was) but I can see how it became a New York Times Bestseller. It seems as if quite a few books strive for empty but decorative prose, sometimes neglecting meaning and transition and nuance. Sometimes I just want a good story, one that moves in layers, one that moves through decades seemingly simply. Not too many writers can toy with time and barely have the reader realize it until one hundred pages later, when the story has ballooned into a multi-faceted plot, which by the way, is what she also did in The Lowland.

This story starts in 1968 and continues somewhere in the year 2000. At first glance it seems as if it is about Ashima, the expectant mother who has left her family in India and must assimilate in America with her new husband, an engineering student. She is hopelessly dependent upon her husband, and fearlessly determined to keep her arranged marriage in tact. However, her son, Gogol, or Nikhil, is really the core of this story. Gogol, an architect, is named after The Overcoat man himself, Nikolai Gogol, a writer whose storytelling pacing Lahiri seems to emulate. Gogol's struggle with his name is reflective of the fears most young Americans from immigrant families face: being treated differently because of a name, an accent, traditions, parents who are blatantly non-American. The name is a symbolic addition that morphs at different phases in the novel, adding nuance to delicate inner thoughts.

What's in a name? What's in a name change, when one wants to become a part of a new society? This name change isn't something I would pretend to know about, though I do know a few things about the struggle with assimilation and identity when moving to a new country. I was named after an American actress my mother loved, even while my mother laid on an African hospital bed. I didn't know this until watching this actress being interviewed (on tv or internet?) and my cousin blurted out, wow, your mannerisms are just like hers, and my mother yelled from the kitchen, but she was named after her! Gogol struggles with his name even while he dates two liberal American women who admire his culture. He struggles with his name when it becomes the subject of a shallow dinner conversation, when he views it as mockery. He struggles with his name when a teacher rudely informs the class of the writer Gogol's eccentricities and his saddening biography. Later, he appreciates his name when he learns how it was given, when he wants to hold on to special memories, when he finally becomes accustomed to being uniquely different.

And yet these events have formed Gogol, shaped him, determined who he is. They were things for which it was impossible to prepare but which one spent a lifetime looking back at, trying to accept, interpret, comprehend. Things that should never have happened, that seemed out of place and wrong, these were what prevailed, what endured, in the end.

The different love scenes were captivating. Gogol dated women I saw clearly, women to whom I could attach the names of friends. He became immersed in the literary and art world through Maxine and her parents, where he learned to relax and enjoy the art of living. He became immersed in the world of language with Moushumi, a woman who was interested in French literature and in finding her own way, her own customs; a woman who wanted to read, travel, study in France, entertain friends, explore meaning through the written word; a woman I could relate to.

I read this book while also sneaking a peek at my March edition of Poetry where I read Gerard Malanga's reflective poem and ode to Stefan Zweig: "Stefan Zweig, 1881-1942." I read this as the news about The Wall scrolled across my tv screen: It may be built, it may not be built; Mexico may pay for it; No, Congress will charge taxpayers for it. I read this while an email popped on my phone from a relative who lives part-time in West Africa and part-time in America: place a call for him to his doctor in America who he visits once a year for a physical he says, because they'll take my accent seriously, but not his. Oy. What's in a name; what's in an accent? And why would someone even try to discern if that someone has not even experienced the trials of moving to a new society, if that someone has lived in the same locale for a lifetime?