The Namesake (2003)

This is a pleasant read, not life-changing for me by any stretch of the imagination, but a nice story written in effortless prose about growing up as a first-generation American of Indian parentage (an experience I had no familiarity with and thus profited from reading about). ( )

This book explores the Indian American experience by focusing on the life of one boy who grows up in a Bengali speaking household seeing first the faults and then the strengths of where he comes from. The parents marriage was arranged in the traditional way and they bring cling to their heritage seeking out Bengali speakers in the Cambridge area where the father teaches engineering and mother cooks all the traditional food. The son wants to escape the binds by going to Yale and Columbia becoming more and more different than his parents. He even changes his name, from Gogol to Nikhil. He's inherited his grandfather's ability to draw and becomes an architect. Eventually he's falling in love with the quintessential American girl, beautiful, well to do, educated, liberated, what could possibly go wrong. It does, his father dies and he is drawn back into the family and this eventually pulls him away too much. Enter a Bengali girl from his extended family who has also been rejecting her heritage and sowing wild oats in Paris and NYC. Both feel awkward about listening to their mothers arranging a blind date for them. But it clicks. They are instantly drawn to each other. They marry. It's bliss but you know it can't last. The wild oats eventually breaks them apart.
Throughout the book the main character has to deal with where his name came from. Gogol was his father's favorite author but there's more to the backstory which he doesn't uncover for many years. ( )

Liked Interpreter of Maladies better, but this was a good, well-written story. ( )

This book is simple. The words are flowery, the plot is plain but there is something so deeply personal about it, about each and every character that you can't help but feel a connection to it. ( )

I had trouble at the beginning of [The Namesake]. Somehow the book didn't grab me until about 20% in (ah, Kindle influence showing there.) Then I was able to get more interested in Gogol and his trials, but felt throughout that something was lacking. I wasn't glued to this story and might not have finished the book if it weren't for the f2f group that met this Tuesday on Zoom. And others in the group voiced what I had only puzzled about. Gogol is not quite passive, but he becomes American by accepting circumstances he encounters in American society, whether that of a rich family in NYC or customs at Yale. It is only when his father dies that we see a hint of complexity. I wish there had been more of that. But this is Lahiri's first novel. Maybe [Unaccustomed Earth] is deeper. ( )