Clover’s Literary Corner: The Big Read: The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri

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By Clover Carroll

The Big Read is a rite of spring in Charlottesville. Funded by the National Endowment for the Arts, this celebration of reading is observed annually in communities all over the U.S., each one reading a different selection in any given year from a set list of titles. But all share the mission to “revitalize the role of literary reading in American popular culture.” You, too, can join the readfest this month by reading  The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri, and/or by attending some of the many and varied events being held at JMRL public library branches throughout the area during March, including a Battle of the Book Groups and Book Swap at the Crozet Library at 7 p.m. on March 26. You will find all the planned events listed at jmrl.org/bigread. Be sure also not to miss the 2006 movie, starring Kal Penn and directed by Mira Nair, a classic of Indie filmmaking.

Not a rollicking adventure like True Grit, nor an insight into American history like The Grapes of Wrath, nor even a passionate love story like Their Eyes Were Watching God (all previous Big Read selections), this year’s Big Read is a quiet bildungsroman, or coming-of-age story, that follows an Indian-American boy from birth in 1968 to adulthood. Most similar to the 2013 Big Read selection, The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan, Lahiri’s 2003 novel is an understated reflection on the unpredictable emotional and psychological costs of the immigrant experience, especially the toll it takes on relations between generations. Both books treat the theme of immigrant alienation and assimilation through the lives of the children of immigrant parents coming to terms with their ethnic identity. Like Jing-Mei in The Joy Luck Club, who comes to appreciate the gift of a jade pendant only after her mother’s death, Gogol only even bothers to read his father’s gift of the collected short stories of his namesake after his father dies. In both cases, these symbolic objects provide a belated connection to the deceased, as well as to the ethnic heritage the children had spent their lives rejecting.

The Namesake begins in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with the birth of a baby boy to MIT engineering professor Ashoke Ganguli and his wife Ashima, who has followed him from Calcutta (now known as Kolkata), in the state of Bengal, India after their arranged marriage. According to Bengali tradition, the child will be given two names: a pet name that he will be called at home, and a “good name” that he will use in public, at school, on the job, and in other formal settings. Ashima’s grandmother was, as tradition again dictates, to provide the good name; however, her letter gets lost in transit and she dies before they can visit India to learn her choice first hand. In the hospital, still expecting the letter from India that never arrives, and pressed to put something on the birth certificate, Ashoke assigns the pet name of Gogol to his son. This name commemorates an horrific train accident that nearly killed Ashoke at the age of 22. Sitting up late reading his favorite Gogol short story, “The Overcoat” by Nikolai Gogol, Ashoke survives when the train derails, while those who were sleeping in their berths are killed instantly. With his body trapped halfway out the window, rescuers find him when a crumpled page of the story drops from his hand. On his 14th birthday, Ashoke gives Gogol a volume of his namesake’s short stories, inscribed “the man who gave you his name, from the man who gave you your name”– but still does not tell Gogol about the true reason for his name.

When young Gogol starts kindergarten, his parents realize that he must finally be given a good name to use at school, so they come up with the Bengali name Nikhil, which echoes the first name of the beloved Russian author. At first rejecting this unfamiliar name, Gogol grows up with the typical immigrant conflicts arising from observing Bengali traditions at home, while learning American ways at school and through the media. To Gogol, America is home; but to his parents, home will always be Calcutta, where their parents live and where they later celebrate Gogol’s traditional Hindu wedding. He always feels like an outsider, not least of all because of his strange name—which isn’t even Indian. “Living with a pet name and a good name, in a place where such distinctions do not exist—surely this was emblematic of the greatest confusion of all.” So when he starts college at Yale, Gogol finally decides to legally change his name to Nikhil, looking forward to “an alternative identity, a B-side to the self.”

This confusing switching between names symbolizes Gogol’s own confusion about his identity. Is he Bengali, is he American—or is he Russian like his name? At Yale, while finding his calling as an architect, he learns that he is what they call an ABCD: an American-Born Confused Deshi (an insider’s term for Indian). Finally, during Gogol’s senior year in college, Ashoke tells his son about the accident which he barely survived, which caused his lifelong limp, and which is the true reason for this choice of name. “And suddenly the sound of his pet name, uttered by his father as he has been accustomed to hearing it all his life, means something completely new, bound up with a catastrophe he has unwittingly embodied for years.” The several train journeys in the book come to symbolize these transitions between worlds—between India and America, between childhood and adulthood, and between alienation and self-acceptance. Over the course of the book, Gogol slowly comes to accept his Indian identity, ultimately marrying another ABCD whom he had met as a child in the Cambridge Bengali community of his parent’s friends. He also comes to realize that the name he rejected is one of his few connections with his self-effacing father.

Lahiri was born in London in 1967 to Bengali immigrant parents; their professions of teacher and university librarian may explain the bookishness of all her characters. The family moved to Rhode Island when she was 3 years old, and she became an American citizen at age 18. She is best known for her short story collection, Interpreter of Maladies, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2000—the first awarded to an Indian-American woman. The Namesake is her first novel, followed in 2008 by a second short story collection, Unaccustomed Earth, and in 2013 by another novel, The Lowland. A lecturer and frequent contributor to The New Yorker, Lahiri lives in Brooklyn with her Guatemalan-Greek husband. Like Gogol, she came to be known by her pet name, Jhumpa, because her good names, Nilanjana and Sudeshna, were deemed too difficult by her school teachers. To some extent, Lahiri is telling her own story here, but through the eyes of a man. This might not have been the best choice, since both Ashima and Moushumi are more vivid, developed characters than Gogol.

There is no doubt that Lahiri’s novel is beautifully written, complex, insightful, and rich with detail. Memorable scenes, as when 19-year-old Ashima steps into the large, still warm shoes of her future husband before meeting him,  touch a deep chord. However, I could never really sink in and get lost in the world Lahiri creates. I did not feel as if I really knew or cared much about the characters, especially the central character, Gogol/Nikhil. As he searches for his elusive identity, he seems to wander without purpose from one girlfriend and one job to another, not becoming deeply involved with any of them. Even when his father dies, and he goes to identify the body and dispose of his father’s belongings, he shows little emotion but seems to be watching events from a distance. Perhaps this numbness is understandable in response to losing a parent, but the same remoteness seems to characterize Gogol’s actions throughout the book. With no central conflict to keep us reading on, the book lacks tension. The story is told primarily through narration and has little dialogue. We don’t  witness any of Gogol’s four breakups in all their pain; we simply learn in the next chapter that the relationship ended. In other words, the story is told, not shown, and to me it never really comes to life.

In its discussion on March 2, however, most of the members of the Crozet Library Book Group disagreed with me. And as usual, they helped me to appreciate the novel more than I did on my own. They liked its lush prose, its sensitive treatment of the immigrant experience, and its convincing depiction of Gogol’s evolution from a lost youth, torn between two worlds, to a mature young man who has come to appreciate his family and its ethnic heritage. In the final scene, Gogol at last sits down to read the volume of Gogol short stories his father had given him—the first time he has even read its touching inscription, a sign of his new appreciation of his father and all his gifts—even of his name. The Namesake is a graceful, gentle book that speaks to the outsider in each of us, encouraging us to accept, love, and celebrate ourselves.

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