Jim Fonseca's Reviews > The Namesake

[Edited 4/30/23]
People between two worlds is the theme, as in many of the author’s books: Bengali immigrants in Boston and how they juggle the complexity of two cultures.

Mainly we follow the coming-of-age story of a young man named Gogol Ganguli. His father gave him that first name because he had a traumatic event in his life during which he met a man who had told him about the Russian author Nikolai Gogol. The father survived the event and later became a fan of the author. (This book inspired me to read or re-read some of Gogol’s classic short stories including The Overcoat and The Nose.)



The story starts in 1968 and the author uses American events as markers of time. They travel back to India to visit relatives infrequently, but when they do, it’s for extended periods – 6 or 8 months, so he and his sister have to go to school in India and they get a real dose of Bengali culture.

One of the best examples of the cultural chasm between the two groups is shown around social gatherings. There was a time when Gogol lived in New York, living a life on the cocktail circuit, four or five couples sitting around the table chatting about art and politics and whatever, drinking fine wine.

Gogol is aware of how thoroughly out-of-place and lost his parents would be in this scene above. Social gatherings at his parents’ suburban house when he grew up were day-long weekend events with a dozen Bengali families and their children eating in shifts at multiple tables. His parents acted as caterers seeing to the needs of all the guests while the children ate separately and played, older ones watching the younger ones.

These Bengali folks are not stereotypical immigrants who are maids and quick-shop clerks living in a crowded ‘Bengali neighborhood.’ They were college educated before their arrival in the US, they all speak English, and they are engineers, doctors and professors (as is Gogol’s father) now living in upscale suburban Boston homes. His mother and father did live for a time in inner-city Boston (in a three-decker tenement like I grew up in).

I think it’s realistic how this young American Bengali boy sometimes absorbs and sometimes rebels against the culture. He and his friends joke about themselves as “ABCD - American Born Confused Deshi.” He and his parents and sister speak Bengali at home but he makes a point of doing things like answering his parents in English and wearing his sneakers in the house. He pulls away from his Bengali heritage at college, deliberately ‘not hanging out with Indians.’

We get glimpses of how the cultural differences affect his parents too. It’s not until she is 47 that his stay-at-home mother makes her real first non-Indian friends, working part-time at the local library.

There isn't an elaborate plot other than that life happens. We touch base with Gogol going to college (Yale), having his first romantic and then sexual experiences, breaking up, getting a job. When Gogol goes to Yale it's 1982, so we learn about his first adventures with girls, alcohol and pot.

He has to start from scratch with women because he has never seen expressions of affection between his parents, not even a touch. As he drifts from woman to woman his mother is always urging him to go to dinner with this or that daughter of Bengali friends that he knew as a little kid running around in the backyard. He's still 'coming of age' when he is 27 and he's still searching for how he fits in between the two cultures.

I'm impressed with how thoroughly the author sticks to the name theme of the title all through the book. His name keeps coming up throughout his life as an integral part of his identity. (view spoiler)[ In college he legally changes his first name. (hide spoiler)] Lahiri is also a master at describing how people meet, fall in love, or enter into a relationship, and then drift apart.

There's a lot of local color of Boston including things I remember from the old days like the Boston Globe newspaper, the ‘girls on the Boston Common,’ name brands like Hood milk, Jordan Marsh and Filene’s Basement.



The Namesake has displaced Interpreter of Maladies as Lahiri’s most popular book even though Interpreter won the Pulitzer prize. I have also read her two other most-read books, both of which are collections of short stories or vignettes: Unaccustomed Earth and Whereabouts. The author’s parents immigrated from Bengal and she grew up near Boston, where her father worked at the University of Rhode Island.

Top photo of Bengali students at Harvard by Shifa Hossain from mittalsouthasiainstitute.harvard.edu
The author receiving the National Humanities medal from Barack Obama from economictimes.indiatimes.com