LITERATURE: The Namesake – Follow-through

Here’s where I think Lahiri may falter, and where a more seasoned writer would have taken the story to a higher level:

A year has passed since his father’s death. He still lives in New York, rents the apartment on Amsterdam Avenue. He works for the same firm. The only significant difference in his life, apart from the permanent absence of his father, is the additional absence of Maxine. At first she’d been patient with him, and for a while he’d allowed himself to fall back into her life, going home after work to her parents’ house, to their world in which nothing had changed. Initially she’d tolerated his silences at the dinner table, his indifference in bed, his need to speak to his mother and Sonia every evening, and to visit them, on weekends, without her. But she had not understood being excluded form the family’s plans to travel to Calcutta that summer to see their relatives and scatter Ashoke’s ashes in the Ganges. Quickly they began to argue about this, and about other things, Maxine going so far one day as to admit that she felt jealous of his mother and sister, an accusation that truck Gogol as so absurd that he had no energy to argue anymore. And so, a few months after his father’s death, he stepped out of Maxine’s life for good. Recently, bumping into Gerald and Lydia in a gallery, he learned of their daughter’s engagement to another man. (p. 188)

This is the opening of Chapter 8. In the previous chapter, Ashoke has died of a massive heart attack while away in Cleveland and Gogol goes to identify the body and make arrangements for his father’s ashes and to clean up the apartment he rented while there on a grant.

What I would have been looking for here is some realizations, some justification for the change in Gogol towards both his family and Maxine. He goes to India presumably after many years, after disassociating himself from it, to go there and deposit his father’s ashes and see family he hadn’t seen in a long time, and yet there is no mention of what I would have thought was a turning point in his life. What would have been a big event for the family. For Ashima, returning there as a widow.

There is nothing but a brief explanation of the termination of his two-year affair with Maxine and his total involvement in her family. Here, after all, is something that he desired–the life if not Maxine, since Lahiri hasn’t really established a loving or committed relationship there.

Two life-changing events without real depth given to their importance to the story. Yet we’ve had menus of meals, name-dropping of branding, rooms described down to the curtains and sounds. And no time devoted to Gogol’s reconsideration of his identity and the loss of his father, over the details of the arrangements and a couple childhood memories (that frankly I would have put into the previous chapters at the appropriate time to add insight into the father-son relationship). I’m surprised and disappointed.

What I see in the above excerpt reads like a quick story summary. Like Lahiri wants to get Maxine out of the picture because even she knows that this relationship hasn’t come off as solid. She wants to move on, get Gogol into another segment of his life. I’m hoping that he becomes more human as we go.