Back When Immigrants Were Welcome Here

I finished listening to Jhumpa Lahiri's "The Namesake" with a deep sigh of satisfaction. A wonderful writer will do that for you, making it all the more obvious when you've read a book by an author whose talents just don't rise to the occasion. That's what happened to me this week as I also finished writing a review about a novel due out in the spring, a novel also about the immigrant experience in America, but one so dark and lacking in substance that I scarcely knew how to talk about it.

Lahiri, who won a Pulitzer for "Interpreter of Maladies," is able to take a domestic novel about one Bengali family adjusting to life in America and raise it to the level of poetry. Especially lovely was the lilting reading by actress Sarita Choudhury.

Ashoke Gangoli, a professor at MIT in Cambridge, returns home to Calcutta to meet the woman who has been chosen as his bride. There is a delightful scene in which Ashima listens outside the room as her parents discuss her with this young man whom she's never met. She sees his polished, cared for shoes where he's left them, according to custom, inside the door. Without thinking, she steps into them and senses that the man who owns these shoes will be a good and caring husband. She is right.

But the novel really centers around their first born child, Gogol Gangoli, and his relationship to his family, his world, and his name. Tradition says that Bengali children will have two names, the "real" one that the grandparents choose, and the nickname chosen by the parents. For the Gangolis  there's no hurry. But Ashoke, stymied by the American practice of leaving the hospital with a birth certificate, makes a very personal decision to name his boy after the Russian writer Nicolai Gogol. And young Gogol will spend the next thirty years both running from, and embracing the identity he's been given.

We follow Gogol through college, his decision not to follow in his father's footsteps as an engineer, his love affair with Maxine and her very white bread family, a decision that he knows will distance him from his own parents but pursues anyway in an attempt to declare his independence from his Indian culture. 

 Lahiri's vivid descriptions of Bengali food and clothing, and the Calcutta that the family returns to every few years,  made this book ripe for the film that came out in 2007 directed by Mira Nair. In fact, it was the movie that brought me to the book rather than the other way around.

"The Namesake" is a poignant, languid coming of age story that explores what it means to be an immigrant, what it means to be an American, and the annoyances and joys of being a member of a family. It also works as an oft- needed reminder of the importance of that welcoming message at the base of the statue of liberty.