For Ashima, who is newly married and nine months pregnant, who misses her family and feels thoroughly alone in New England in the late 1960s, everything in America is "a humble approximation" of her life in India, which she left behind when she married Ashoke, an engineering student at MIT. For Lahiri, who won a Pulitzer Prize for her debut short story collection INTERPRETER OF MALADIES, this revelatory detail is typical: refined, effortless and graceful, it seems obvious only because it's so profound. The rest of the novel follows this tack, locating small truths and ironies in mundane, often overlooked objects like food and, as the title suggests, names.

While mixing her snack, Ashima goes into labor and the next day her first child is born --- it's a boy. Such a joyous occasion for Ashima and Ashoke is nonetheless complicated by the choice of names. Bengalis, Lahiri explains, have not one but two names --- a pet name used by family and friends, and a good name by which he or she is known to the world. "Pet names are a persistent remnant of childhood, a reminder that life is not always so serious, so formal, so complicated," she says. "Good names tend to represent dignified and enlightened qualities" and appear on diplomas, awards and certificates.

Following Bengali custom, the choice of names is left to Ashima's aging grandmother, who posts a letter containing one name for a girl and another for a boy. But the letter never arrives and grasping for choices Ashoke chooses Gogol, a name with much greater significance than merely that of his favorite writer.

Lahiri introduces the Gangulis in such a way that it feels impossible not to be enticed into their world and demand to know their journeys, hardships and fates. After confidently setting these characters in motion, she traces their lives and the repercussions of Gogol's name through three decades, knowingly evoking the compromises and sacrifices they make to adjust to life in America. Throughout the novel, her prose is consistently somber and refined, subtle and subdued, but always pointed and revealing. Likewise the novel's pace arcs gracefully, a model of writerly patience.

But what makes THE NAMESAKE so enthralling and so richly readable is the care with which Lahiri recreates the ever-changing America where the Gangulis live. She populates her scenes and descriptions with a multitude of well-observed specifics --- at times far more details than necessary for verisimilitude, but never once threatening to overwhelm the story.

More crucially, Lahiri writes about Indian and American cultures with the same generosity of detail. She evokes the suburbia of Gogol's adolescence through his beloved Beatles albums and the Olan Mills school pictures as confidently as she describes his adulthood in New York through Ikea furniture and Dean & DeLuca gift baskets. Her descriptions of Ashima's painstaking preparations of mincemeat croquettes are as assured as her descriptions of spaghetti alla vongole at a dinner party.

Such a range of details may not seem overly significant, but Lahiri uses these differences in cultures and cuisines to keep the reader aware of the growing rift between these two worlds, of how far Gogol has moved from his origins and of how strongly those Bengali ties hold him in ways that he only gradually begins to realize.

Ultimately, there is something culinary about THE NAMESAKE, something complex, refined and robust in its blends of ingredients, something substantial and nourishing in its interplay of ideas and characters. This is a novel to savor, whose taste will linger in the reader's mind long after the last course is eaten, the dishes washed and put away, and the book placed aside on the shelf.

--- Reviewed by Stephen M. Deusner from Bookreporter.com


Disappointing, Bland, and Stereotypical   September 29, 2003
 25 out of 32 found this review helpful

I am stunned by all the hype and the positive reviews in the media and on Amazon about this book. Lahiri's 'wanna be' New Yorker sparse style doesn't work. In fact, it plods and burdens the narrative in such a way that the characters themselves (not just the author) become self conscious.

The story is typical and hackneyed. Husband and wife move to Cambridge, MA from India. Wife struggles with domesticity and change. Husband aspires to new beginnings. They have a son, Gogol. Son grows up confused, grapples with strange Russian name. The American backdrop pulls son in two different directions. And so on.

The indirect, non-emotive style fails us throughout the novel. We begin to suspect that there isn't a layer beneath the surface. There is no bubbling turbulence, the hallmark of masters of sparsity. We never really know the characters or their feelings. They flit in and out of their material world, and we are denied entry to their emotional or mental states.

Many Indian writers have already dealt with the immigrant experience, lyrically, beautifully, and innovatively. This is not new anymore. It is over done! Writers of the diaspora are now so beyond this subject area that they have either started writing about a generation born and brought up here, comfortable with their Indianness or having forsaken it altogether (eg. Salman Rushdie, Bharati Mukerjee etc.) or they have given themselves the liberty and the permission to write freely about an Indian or South Asian perspective, set solely and completely in those spaces. Read Amitav Ghosh, Rohinton Mistry etc.

Lahiri is the creation of an MFA program, and Houghton Mifflin's ridiculous marketing and advertising budget.

Don't waste your time or money on this book. There is a body of work out there worthy of the basic theme of immigrant literature.


A Fraud!   April 6, 2005
 20 out of 40 found this review helpful

Jhumpa Lahiri is a decent writer who desperately wants to say something about cross-cultural identity. Lahiri has little to say, nothing, at least, that's of real significance. She is a fraud, frankly, a Western-born and -raised woman who thinks she can communicate something of pure and immediate value on what it means to be Indian growing up in America. Again, she has nothing to say. And it's clear that she's just co-opting experiences that she's read about or heard her relatives talk about. If she had truly gone through something as traumatic as assimilation, she wouldn't chosen that lamest of metaphors -- a man's embarrassment over his name, something which elicits the lamest and least interesting episodes throughout the book -- to underscore the drama.

A very weak book with weak, contemptibly dundering characters. I hated Gogol, Moushima--that skank he marries--and this is not the response Lahiri is going for. For lack of any deep, insightful character development, she opts for an accretion of details of the white, moneyed, well-heeled world of New Englanders. There is little or no discussion about race, color and the shame of sexual liberation. Why did this writer ever think that she had a grasp on this material?

A story of identity is beyond anyone who hasn't had to grapple with ethnic slurs, racial disconnection, economic poverty, all as a child. It is well beyond Lahiri. I will say that the portrayal of Ashima and Ashoke, the Indian immigrant-parents, was spot-on (I assume it's just a description of her own parents and relatives) and that the sequence leading up to and following Ashoke's death was marvelous. Gogol, himself, is a blank--Lahiri gibve him nothing going on in his head, no sense of a goal or direction, nor a clear enough sense of self, to hook us in.

While reading this book, I was often enraged. It's really just a silly Harlequin romance disguised as a respectable literature. Indians and Indian-American writers (like me)-- the book serves, if anything, as a rallying cry, i.e. something whose memory needs to be obliterated and vindicated through your own writing. It's obvious that she's going for something lyrical and poetic. But, without an undercurrent of truth--the feeling that this story HAD TO BE TOLD--the prose goes limp and precious. Bad, bad stuff. On the other hand, check out her short stories, many of which quite good. My advice to Lahiri: stop writing about the immigrant experience and stick to white Manhattan loft dwellers sipping fine wine.


Let me not be next to Lahiri on a long trip   April 28, 2006
 20 out of 34 found this review helpful

I figure that one star is fair, because I only enjoyed the first fifth of this book. By page 200, only the fact that I would be attending a book discussion kept me going. To be fair, most of the group liked the book.

This book is written in a style that I personally call "The Airplane Seatmate from Hell." That is, the book prattles on in a boring manner about superficial and sometimes slightly deep subjects in excessive detail. People don't have snacks, or even wine and cheese, they have merlot and asiago, but they have very few reactions to the events in their lives. We know that Ashima was embarrassed when she said "finger and toe" instead of "fingers and toes", but why did she get a library job? Did she like it? How did close contact with a presumably wider segment of American society affect her? How did she affect her coworkers?

There is little character development. The elder Gangulis seem to be generic Bengali emigrants; we have individual details about them, but they don't have individual personalities. I don't think that I would have thought that anyone was acting out of character because I never had a clear idea of what they were like.

Since I knew that I was going to read this, I didn't read the flaps or anything else about it. The first 50-60 pages were quite interesting as I learned about Bengali customs. I assumed, from these opening pages, that the Gangulis were going back to India when Ashoke finished his degree. An exemplar of the problem with the book is that I cannot figure out why they remained in the USA. Oh, we know why Ashoke went to America, but now that he has had his adventure and he doesn't seem to love the USA as his mentor Ghosh loved Britain, why does he stay?

I don't mean to take a "love or leave it" stance: there would be a lot of stateless persons if that was the rule. It is simply that the Gangulis seem to miss India terribly, and there is no explanation for their remaining in the USA. Other members of the group threw out various suggestions, but the issue isn't the top ten reasons why people move to the USA, but rather, why did this particular family stay here? People may live regretfully in exile, forced from, or prevented from returning to their country by famine, war, political turmoil, poverty, etc., but these don't apply to the Gangulis. Other group members suggested that Lahiri wanted to show how people are torn between cultures. I'm sure they are, but "torn" implies a pull from at least two sides: what is the pull of the USA for the Gangulis? Are we supposed to just assume that of course, everybody wants to live in the USA?

The book uses a great many flashbacks, which stifles what little narrative drive there is. Very emotional scenes tend to be avoided in the present and discussed only in the past tense in a rather flat way.

If Gogol/Nikhil's constant obsessing over his name is supposed to indicate divided loyalties, it would have been better to have used a Bengali name versus a European name; say, Nikhil/Nicholas. Otherwise, he needs to get psychological help - in a culture where people commonly have two names, why is this such a problem for him? For that matter, other Americans often have two or more names - what's the big deal? I can understand that one may be wistful at losing all the people who used a family nickname, but this seems to be the most important issue in his life. Perhaps if we understood what this means to him besides vaguely that it is a dilemma, I'd be more sympathetic. His intercultural conflicts also seem minor and manageable: it's not like his parents are on his case to accept an arranged marriage. Altogether, a tedious character. [Added later:] Nikhil/Gogol's dilemma might have had some resonance if it had been portrayed as the struggle within ourselves, between conflicting wants and needs, that everyone experiences. One can feel like a stranger in a strange land in the place that one was born.

Ashima was mildly interesting, and Sonia might have been very interesting, but she was a minor character.

I've read much better books about the immigrant experience, both fiction and nonfiction: Eric Liu's The Accidental Asian: Notes of a Native Speaker; Isaac Asimov's In Memory Still Green, where he dicusses the shock to his Russian parents of suddenly being illiterate; Fifth Chinese Daughter by Jade Snow Wong; the dilemmas of Pakhistani-Britain Sahlah Malik in Elizabeth Georges' Deception on His Mind; the movie Bend It Like Beckham (Widescreen Edition). I recommend this only to people with a particular interest in Bengalis. Or, read the first few chapters, learn some interesting things abut Bengalis, and forget the rest of the book. Or just read a book about Bengal: Calcutta: A Cultural and Literary History (Cities of the Imagination) by Krishna Dutta or Bengal: Sites and Sights by Pratapaditya Pal & Enamul Haque both sound promising.


Avon Romance with Curry Spices   February 11, 2008
 20 out of 24 found this review helpful

The Namesake begins as a novel of immigration, a familiar genre for obvious reasons in the USA. The first two chapters, describing the dislocation and alienation of the Gangulis upon moving to Cambridge, MA, are relatively poignant and evocative, though the same experiences have been described more memorably in dozens of books. Then the American-born second generation son, Gogol, is introduced, and the rest of the book focuses on his prolonged identity crisis, especially the tension he feels between the expectations of his family and his own desire for assimilation. Again, there's not much new here; the same story has been told with greater realism and more believable individuation of characters by writers from all corners of the planet, including such masterpieces of fiction as "The Bread Givers" by Anzia Yezierska, "Peder Victorious" by Ole Rolvaag, and "Call It Sleep" by Henry Roth, as well as very fine books by more recent writers like Amy Tan, Gus Lee, Julia Alvarez, and more. As a novel of immigration, The Namesake doesn't belong on the same shelf as these. But it doesn't try to. In fact, it changes genres completely around the third chapter, becoming a story of failed love, or rather of serial romatic failures, three humdrum and futile sexual partnerships (one a marriage) all based on mere happenstance of encounter and all ending "not with a bang but a whimper." Honestly, Nikhil Gogol Ganguli is too boringly self-absorbed to be much of a partner, or to be very entertaining to read about. He learns nothing from his wussy love affairs, and in truth there's nothing to learn.

There's nothing especially potent about Jhumpa Lahiri's prose, either. Descriptions are as stale as the dilemmas of life her characters face. Neither Cambridge nor Calcutta is vividly evoked; streets are named, buses are caught, but the imagination slumbers page after page. Likewise, the romantic episodes of Gogol's plodding life are narrated without sensuality. We are told what happens, but we don't feel empathy.

Why, perhaps you want to ask, did I bother to finish The Namesake if I disliked so much? Well, I'm a bit of a compulsive reader, and it was the only novel I had in hand at the time. Also, I began to sense that I'd have to review it by the middle of the book, so I had to finish it in order to be fair. Now I can say, in fairness, that if I were an editor, I wouldn't even consider publishing such mediocrity.