. Spinning .

In Chapter 8, Gogol is set up with Moushumi and there’s quite a whirlwind affair. Lahiri at long last seems to have Gogol actually caring for someone. There is a quick escalation of the relationship and for some reason, we’re given a blow by blow of Moushumi’s past which includes a broken engagement–yes, this point would be important enough–and the rather stark realization that while she lived in Paris, she slept with just about anybody. Sometimes two and three in one day. I’m not sure she told Gogol this, but Lahiri does tell us, in one of her “tell, don’t show” episodes. Of which the next chapter is a shining example.

Chapter 9 is quite possibly the worst chapter in this book so far. With Gogol and Moushumi dating through the work of their parents, they get married. There is the wedding, a trip to Paris, and a dinner party with friends of Moushumi.

We get such minute details of the wedding, the guests, the food, and yet not much of the ceremony. Here again, it’s almost like a reporting of an event that misses the meaning, the feeling behind it.  Even when they go to Paris for a brief stay, we get a description of the apartment of a friend where they’re staying:

Instead of staying at a hotel, they stay in an apartment in the Bastille which belongs to a friend of Moushumi’s, a male friend named Emanuel, a journalist, who is on holiday in Greece. The apartment is barely heated, minuscule, at the top of six steep flights of stairs, with a bathroom the size of a phone booth. There is a loft bed just inches from the ceiling, so that sex is a serious hazard. An espresso pot nearly fills the narrow two-burner stove. Apart from two chairs at the dining table, there is no place to sit. (p. 230)

I only wish that Lahiri had allowed as much time to the reason that Moushumi was so vague and distant after she delivered her presentation that she’d worked so hard on.

He sits down, orders a coffee. “How was it? How did it go?”

She lights a cigarette. “Okay. Over with, at any rate.”

She looks more regretful than relieved, her eyes lingering over the small round table between them, the veins in the marble bluish, like those in cheese.

Normally she wants a full account of his adventures, but today they sit silently, watching the passers-by. (p. 233)

We may assume that Paris reminds her of a time in her life when she was happy, independent, and in love. But she’s newly married and it seems a little odd. It’s likely that the presentation makes it obvious to her that she’ll be leaving Paris again, but we just don’t have the fullness of the scene that would have made it notable.

The last segment of the chapter is the dinner party at her friends–and here Lahiri gives us more information about the guests and what they do for a living and the description of the house, the meal, and their former ties to her ex fiancee that its all unnecessary information. Meanwhile, the changes that are seeping into the couple’s relationship is sort of passed over. Even with a (rather convenient) discussion among all the couples about baby names, and the blurting out by Moushumi that Nikhil’s name was originally Gogol elicits a rather strange response from him. He is thirty years old by now and should have come to terms with it by now. The name, more than anything, still seems to irk him.

The final lines in this scenario, and of the chapter, leave me wincing.

And yet he can’t help but recall a novel he’d once picked up from the pile on Moushumi’s side of the bed, an English translation of something French, in which the main characters were simply referred to, for hundreds of pages, as He and She. He had read it in a matter of hours, oddly relieved that the names of the characters were never revealed. It had been an unhappy love story. If only his own life were so simple. (p. 245)

Huh? How complicated is his life? He’s been raised by loving parents, gotten all the education he could desire, has a good job, never gone hungry, had a few sexual affairs that didn’t require any emotional input from him, married a woman who he was genuinely attracted to and felt something for. Poor Gogol!

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.

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.

Feels so good to be getting through a book more than a page or two at a time. Here I am at the end of Chapter 5 and I’ve noticed a few more things.

The point of view is obviously third person, omniscient, as we shift focus from the original main characters of Ashima and Ashoke to their son, Gogol (a.k.a. Nikhil–more on this in a bit). Lahiri includes the date, or year, below each chapter number, thus dividing the story into sections that actually span a few years, allowing Gogol to grow up, struggle for his identity, move in a direction that weaves in the history of his name even as he spurns it.

Something interesting about the way the novel is set up, with the narrative guided so strictly by timeline, is that the book is entirely in present tense. Present tense is difficult to employ throughout a story the length of a novel. It is used most often in the crime fiction genre where it is best used to keep up the tension. Present tense in truth becomes past the moment after it is read, however, and to use it within the structure of this novel and to do it credibly and well, is a tribute to Jhumpa Lahiri as an author.

At the end of the previous chapter, Gogol is coming home for Thanksgiving on a break from college when the train he is on is halted for many hours following a suicide on the tracks. When his father picks him up at the station, he is obviously a bit worried. Ashoke then tells Gogol the real reason he has been named after the Russian author, and tells him the details of that horrible night when he was seriously injured in a train wreck. Gogol is dumbstruck, learning so much more about his father than he’d never thought to ask, and gaining a new respect of sorts for the name.

When he started college, Gogol officially changed his name to Nikhil, leaving only those in his past, his family and his friends in Massachusetts referring to him as Gogol. What struck me at this point of the story is that we, the reader, are part of that past association. The character is still being referred to as Gogol to us. It’s an interesting point, and yet one where much of the fine points of writing are at play. The author must encourage an empathy for his main characters. To switch names on us now would be risky. We, more fortunate than even Gogol’s parents, are privileged to still know him by his pet name.

This has happened to me before, where I decide that it’s time to make a statement on something going on in the story and so make up a post, then pick up the book and find my thoughts pretty much confirmed.

On my previous post about the real reason Gogol is feeling so adamantly against his name, I’d picked up a thought more along the lines of a cultural clash that he is undergoing. In this next section, there is more going on that makes the conflict more evident. For one, Gogol is enamored with a girl named Ruth who he knows his parents aren’t willing to accept with open arms. Then he attends a lecture, one of his cousins being a member of the panel, on the subject of what they call “ABCD” or “American-born confused deshi” which brings the plight of someone like Gogol to light. His problems as an Indian in America is not the same as his parents’, as they relate to the old country whereas he relates to the new. His name merely brings what Gogol sees more as confliction rather than confusion to a more constant state.

The concept of the novel is, again, the changes that a person goes through when being transplanted into a different culture, as are Ashima and Ashoke, or being raised between cultures, as is Gogol.

The problem of his name, the family or familiar name versus a real or outside name, the decision to name him Gogol under the pressure of hospital rules when he was born, the decision to give him a real name of Nikhil when he started kindergarten, and Gogol’s refusal to accept that name at the time all seem to have settled into a comfort of sorts until Gogol reaches high school and is faced with the real Gogol in literature class. It seems to upset him more than it should, and even he is aware that while he’s expecting people to relate the discussion to him, they do not. Just as no one has teased him on his name as he’d expected.

Even when his father presents him with a book of Gogol’s work on his fourteenth birthday, Gogol responds as considerately as he can, knowing that it means something to his father, but his emotional response is again, overreaction in a negative way. When he gets to college, he legally changes his name to Nikhil.

It does surprise me that he appears to be so strongly adverse to the name of Gogol, since its really been generally accepted by his friends and never a source of intentional embarrassment or bullying. However, I think I see more than an emotional response to the name. I would say it’s more a rejection of the traditions that he has always been involved in on holidays, yet not a daily part of his routine. He is allowed to dress, eat, enjoy more American based living, and there is perhaps a confusion between the worlds. When the family returns to India for visits, Gogol and his sister do not feel the ties that his parents do. For them, their being raised in American ways make them American.

The other thing that I would think is more a part of Gogol’s rebellion against his name is his natural teenage inclination to assert himself. Changing his name is a big step to establish that separation of child and man, traditions that are not felt are being replaced by determining his identity.

In my senior year of high school, I changed the spelling of my name to include an extra n: Susann.  That lasted a few months but forevermore, my year book, my diploma, several awards, are all in a name I just needed to try out.

Gogol notices the difference between Gogol and Nikhil. There is more going on here than a name change.

Since the focus of this novel appears to be the conflict between tradition and acceptance of a new way of life for immigrants, I found this notion interesting:

To predict his future path in life, Gogol is offered a plate holding a clump of cold Cambridge soil dug up from the backyard, a ballpoint pen, and a dollar bill, to see if he will be a landowner, scholar, or businessman. Most children will grab at one of them, sometimes all of them, but Gogol touches nothing. He shows no interest in the plate, instead turning away, briefly burying his face in his honorary uncle’s shoulder.

“Put the money in his hand!” someone in the group calls out. “An American boy must be rich!”

“No!” his father protests. “The pen. Gogol, take the pen.”  (p. 40)

I’m backtracking here only because I’ve come upon another similar scenario, when the rice ceremony, celebration of a baby’s first introduction to solid food, repeats itself with Gogol’s new little sister.

She plays with the dirt they’ve dug up from the yard and threatens to put the dollar bill into her mouth. “This one,” one of the guests remarks, “this is the true American.”  (p. 63)

It is here where the reader would be affected by his or her own background, as an American or non-American, and if an American, likely of what generation. I’m relatively new, being a second generation born American, my grandparents having come over from Europe in the early part of the twentieth century, around the time of World War I. I’m not sure of their reason for making the move, but I suspect it was for a new life of opportunity that was being touted as the American Dream.

I must admit I’m put off a bit by the foregoing passages only in that it seems to define Americans as only interested in money. I don’t find that to be true. The opportunity that most immigrants seek, and I’m sure Ashoke and Ashima and their friends as well, is to be able to earn a good living and have things they could not have in their own countries. It’s the opportunity, not the money. I think this is one of the most misunderstood elements of the American way of life and of Americans.

In this story, Ashoke who is himself a lover of books and a university professor, urges Gogal to take the pen that assumes scholarship. He alone seems to see the value in the choice that would not offer just personal satisfaction, but would lead to creating an opportunity for financial gain as well. One of the first things the couple does when Ashoke is hired is save and buy a house and car.

Work that earns income translates into shelter, food, education. The medium used to translate one into the another is money. Are we not to aspire to having a nice home? Enjoyable, healthy food? As much of an education as we can afford or gain ourselves through reading and acquiring knowledge? Then what’s the problem?

This isn’t a very deep novel, there are no hidden meanings, no metaphors to pick up in delight. But it is a very intimate story of culture differences and the longing for traditions and values that can be transplanted but are not quite the same in a new land. The main ingredient missing, for Ashima, is family. While Ashoke has coped with the changes in a different manner, becoming more of an island that is self sufficient. This has perhaps come from his injuries in the train wreck as a youth and the resulting long rehabilitation that was spent in a loneliness, even as he was well taken care of by his family. The shock of the accident, the realization that a gentleman he had briefly come to know had instantly died, the loss of his treasured book, may have prepared him better, taught him not to hold onto things as they can be taken away.

The losses are more clearly felt by Ashima, even as she makes friends, enters motherhood, gets used to Cambridge. Each ritual is still clouded by the missing mother and father, grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins. The third person narrator deftly describes much of the Indian dress, rites, dishes, and yet makes them easily understood without heavy detail. The voice is neutral, even as it describes Ashima’s worries, her loneliness, her giving birth, and at this point in the story, the telephone call that brings the bad news of the sudden death of her father back home.

“He told you something you’re not telling me. Tell me, what did he say?”

He continues to shake his head, and then he reaches across to her side of the bed and presses her hand so tightly that it is slightly painful. He presses her to the bed, lying on top of her, his face to one side, his body suddenly trembling. He holds her this way for so long that she begins to wonder if he is going to turn off the light and caress her. Instead, he tells her what Rana told him a few minutes ago, what Rana couldn’t bear to tell his sister, over the telephone, himself; that her father died yesterday evening, of a heart attack, playing patience on his bed.  (p. 45)

Thrilled that I finally got back into reading stories longer than flash fiction, and flush with success on Conrad’s short Heart of Darkness, I looked through my bookcases to find something that would be entertaining and fairly easy reading.

I’ve been wanting to read this novel by Jhumpa Lahiri for a while. It’s one of many “must-reads” that are not really listed as classics because they’re too recent. It’s a New York Times Bestseller, and a winner of the Pulitzer Prize, so I’ve every reason to believe that I’m likely just reading a classic years before its time.

The writing is simple yet lovely. The story, very human and real. Ashima and Ashoke are a young Bengali couple who have married and moved to America, living in Boston. Ashima is young and intelligent, grateful that her arranged marriage at least provided her with a man who was not too much older than her. As the story opens, Ashima is just going into the first labor stages. We are backtracked to discover her history and that of Ashoke and discover a bit more about them that establishes their characters and reveals some inner fears that lead up to the focus of this story, choosing the name of their newborn son.

We learn that when Ashoke was young, he was involved in a very serious train wreck that left him in rehabilitation for a long time. We also find that he is a lover of books, and at the time of the accident, he was reading his favorite story, “The Overcoat,” by Gogol. A man whom he’d conversed with had died in the wreck as had many others. The trauma haunts him for a long time, into his adult life. With the birth of his son, the name takes on a different meaning as the young couple must come up with a name for the baby before he’s allowed to be released.

The writing is fine, delicate without being flowery, and Lahiri distributes much information in an entertaining and interesting manner. One of my favorite passages is this, when Ashoke first holds his son:

Being rescued from that shattered train had been the first miracle of his life. But here, now, reposing in his arms, weighing next to nothing but changing everything, is the second. (p. 24)