Okay, so I’ve learned that this is not the book for which Jhumpa Lahiri won the Pulitzer Prize. I found this out by checking the cover again after puzzling over the last few pages of reading. It’s been made into a major motion picture–and that I can see, the story would be entertaining on the big screen, but I cannot quite see how it made the New York Times Bestseller list.
I was so happy that I’ve been going through this book as quickly as I have been–at the halfway point now–since it’s been hard to concentrate on anything longer than flash fiction for the past year due to the heavy amount of reading and writing that genre and length. It’s beginning to dawn on me why.
The Namesake is a simply written, simply structured novel. The characters are limited to Ashima, Ashoke, and Gogol pretty much. The life of Gogol so far has been a series of jumps in time tied together with small events that spend more time on description of setting and environment than real character development. As a matter of fact, there are facts stated about the characters yet I don’t see the real depth of the characters themselves.
For example, I don’t really understand why Gogol is so strongly adverse to his name. We are told that he grows to dislike it, and we can guess that there’s more behind it–I came up with the difference he faces in cultures between home and school/work life coupled with typical teenage rebellion and striving for identity. But Lahiri hasn’t really shown us the inner conflict on the name; she’s told us.
I’m also beginning to lose empathy for Gogol–though I feel strongly still about his father in particular (his mother has sort of faded away as a force in the story) and that’s probably because I know what he’s carried around within him from the train accident he suffered through as a youth–and even there, there’s no real focus on why it means so much to him and why what he was reading at the time (Gogol) would have made such an impression. But as for Gogol/Nikhil, he’s jumped into a relationship with a woman named Maxine and has pretty much moved in with her and her parents. They are wealthy and intelligent and he seems to be ashamed of his own parents in comparison. Ashoke is a prominent university professor–why would Gogol place a lawyer and a museum textile curator above him?
On a visit to Maxine’s family’s lake home, Lahiri gives us a blow by blow description of the furnishings, the food they eat for dinner, and where Gogol and Maxine make love. What she doesn’t give us, however, is a glimpse into the mind and soul of her main character.
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