Warning: this review has spoilers. Review spoiler: though I can’t imagine anyone being surprised by a single thing that happens in this book, or saddened to not have discovered it in the natural process of reading.
The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri
I’d put off reading The Namesake for a long time. It was one of those books that people recommend to you, unsolicited, without any specific ideas as to why. When I recommend books these days, I at least try to give a one liner in their favor. “It’s about an English professor who threatens to strangle a duck every day until his department’s budget is passed” (Straight Man). “It’s about a Southern Baptist family who moves to the Congo on a church mission and is woefully unprepared for everything” (The Poisonwood Bible). “It’s about a lame-of-leg son of a whore who realizes he is not the main character in the fantasy novel” (Sir Apropos of Nothing) The best The Namesake’s recommenders could do was this: “It’s by Jhumpa Lahiri,” they said, “You know, the one who wrote Interpreter of Maladies.” Name-checking the author has its place; I would submit that that place is not “their first novel after their debut short story collection won an unexpected Pulitzer.” This should have been my first clue.
From the cover copy, The Namesake seemed to have similar thematic content to my novel-in-progress: generational gaps, disaffected youths, a protagonist whose name does not represent him, etc. Gogol Ganguli had promise, I decided, and I would read this one for Ideas. Instead, The Namesake was a much better lesson on what to avoid.
The first chapter went well. We arrive while Ashima is in labor, our protagonist of destiny on the cusp of being born. Excellent backstory on both of his parents, a really good sense of What Lead Us Here. Everything you could want in an introductory chapter. Then we move to chapter two, and we’re still in Ashima’s point of view. Gogol is still a baby. Ok, I thought, that’s more setup than I would have done, but maybe this is all leading to something. It would be like a high jump, where the novel takes a running approach, then leaps into a spectacular narrative arc. It was somewhere around page 150, when we had covered Gogol’s rice ceremony, his first day at kindergarten, his elementary school eating preferences, his high school English class, and his first college girlfriend, that I realized no, this was it. We weren’t watching a high jump, we were on a 400-yard dash through the Life and Times of a First Generation Suburban Bengali-American.
This might not have been so bad, as a structure. The more pressing problem is that the book lacks any narrative tension whatsoever. Sure, the characters sigh sometimes with ennui, and are plagued by nagging doubts about their multi-cultural lives. None of them act on it. Internal conflict is valid, but it’s a very Short Story way to write. Novels need external conflict to sustain the story, even if that external conflict is only an expression of the internal one1. Even Gogol’s name, the promise from the very title of the book, produces little in the way of conflict. He changes it quietly on his 18th birthday, and experiences only minor discomfort whenever it comes up again later in his life, at dinner parties or from his mother. More than once he stops to ruminate (ever so generally) on how odd it is that he is now Nikhil, instead of Gogol. These reflective moments might have had more weight to them if Gogol or Nikhil more in the way of personality for us to compare and contrast. Gogol, like his rice ceremony foretold, is passive and solitary, without strong motivation in any direction. Nikhil is the same, going to college, getting a job, renting an apartment just like a good American should. He causes no conflict and Lahiri visits none upon him.
So it is with the women in Gogol’s life. He never takes initiative; they all throw themselves in his way. On page 193 we meet Moushumi, the Bengali-American girl Gogol will soon marry (for perhaps the wrong, complicated, post-colonial reasons). We learn that, unlike Gogol with his unremarkable journey from American milestone to American milestone, Moushumi has been under tremendous pressure due to her heritage, and suffered significant loss for it along the way. She has real conflicts with her immigrant parents. She spent her childhood in fear of arranged marriage, poisoning her future relationships. She moved to France as an act of rebellion. And then Graham, her investment banker fiancé, breaks her heart and walks out on her weeks before their wedding because in the end he cannot appreciate (in fact disdains!) all the family and ritual and culture that makes Moushumi Bengali.
Why?! Why would you not write the novel of Moushumi? All of the same background as the milquetoast Gogol, but with an honest to god narrative arc! Conflicts that carry consequences for her life story! A brilliant climax when she throws her ring into the street and Graham strikes her in the face! You could even keep her marriage to Gogol and her subsequent affair2 as a sobering reminder that when it comes to postcolonial identity, there are no happy endings.
Is it more representative of the first-generation-American experience to describe airplane food and hat shopping than dramatic fights and broken engagements? I can’t say. But here’s what I’ve learned: multicultural or not, be careful not to write a novel in short story voice. A short story can stand as a slice of life, structured around internal conflict. In a short story, every small action gains importance. In a several-hundred-page novel, this mode is unsustainable, the same way it is over a lifetime. A novel needs that conflict to leave the protagonist’s navel, to burst forth into the external world. We need to see the hurdle and wonder if he’ll make it over.
1About 6 months ago, my roommate recommended that I read Sag Harbor by Colson Whitehead, and even went as far as to lend me his copy. I was fifty pages in before I thought to ask him “does this book have any conflict?” His answer was no, not really, so I didn’t finish.
2By the time the affair comes around, twenty pages from the end, it seems like just one more checkbox on the American Life to-do list. And of course, Gogol is not the one who initiates it.
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