Woman with a Water Jug Jan Vermeer, ~1664

There is something about the 17th Century painter Jan Vermeer that seems to have held an unusually strong fascination for women novelists in recent years. In 1999-2000 his work was the focus of books published within the same twelve-month period by three different women -- Girl with a Pearl Earring by Tracy Chevalier, Girl in Hyacinth Blue by Susan Vreeland, and Circles of Confusion by April Henry. Having read two of the three, I really began to wonder what it was about his work that seemed so relevant to all three women. The immediate appeal of his small canvasses might seem to be his concentration on domestic scenes, or his mastery of color, light and texture -- velvet and satin you can feel, rich tapestries and carpets, the luminescence of a stained glass window. But there is something else that draws us into his scenes -- a sense of the inner life of his subjects whose stories we do not know -- the half smile, the pensive look, the startled glance -- gestures that hint at complexities of emotion beneath his exquisitely rendered surfaces. Something akin, perhaps, to William Carlos Williams famous injunction to modern poets -- "no ideas but in things." Without the particular, the universal can't be experienced viscerally -- a point of view especially appropriate for our times when old archetypes and iconic images seem to have lost much of their power to touch us.

Something about Jhumpa Lahiri's new novel, The Namesake, reminds me of a Vermeer painting. She writes in quiet language that neither calls attention to itself nor invites the reader to wrestle with it, yet her eye for details and precise descriptions draw us into an almost tactile experience of her settings. Far from being a literary virtual reality ride, or a voyeuristic zoo-train view of an exotic subculture, however, these sensory experiences, like the surface patterns of a rivulet, suggest the contours of what lies below and behind the flow of her narrative, making our empathy for her characters more palpable.

Like Vermeer, also, she has chosen a limited canvas. Her tale is modest in proportions, the story of a first-generation Bengali-American boy and his family and their lives in the interstices between the land and culture of their heritage and the social ecology of their life in the US. Reports from the front lines of twenty-and-thirty-something Americans of South Asian descent indicate that Lahiri's representation is spot on in its particulars -- the family and community gatherings watching tv with other kids and "eating watered-down curry off paper plates" while parents converse loudly "in the Bengali the children don't speak among themselves," the trips "home" to a strange country, the every-other-Saturday Bengali lessons taught in a friend's house from "hand sewn primers brought back by their teacher from Calcutta, intended for five-year-olds, printed, Gogol can't help noticing, on paper that resembles the folded toilet paper he uses at school." -- all carefully chosen details that bring the reader right into the settings along with her characters.

The armature on which the story is built is the unusual name of the protagonist, Gogol -- an accidental naming forced on his parents by the need to put something on his birth certificate before bringing their newborn home from the hospital. This hurry-up attitude is bewildering to the young recently-arrived Bengali couple who were waiting for an official "good name" to be chosen by an older relative and who would have let his "pet name" -- the name used by family only -- evolve naturally in the intimacy of the home. When his father blurts out the name Gogol in the hospital, it comes to him as a blast from a crisis from his own past -- a past that he does not share with The Namesake until Gogol, who has come to loathe and abandon the name, is a senior in college. The story his father tells only seems to heighten the boy's confusion. She writes:

"Gogol listens, stunned, his eyes fixed on his father's profile. Though there are only inches between them, for an instant his father is a stranger, a man who has kept a secret, has survived a tragedy, a man whose past he does not fully know. A man who is vulnerable, who has suffered in an inconceivable way."

And when Gogol demands tearfully to know why he has not been told the story before, we have the following exchange:

"It happened so long ago. I didn't want to upset you."

"It doesn't matter. You should have told me."

"Perhaps, his father concedes, glancing briefly in Gogol's direction. He removes the keys from the ignition. "Come, you must be hungry. The car is getting cold."

But Gogol doesn't move. He sits there, still struggling to absorb the information, feeling awkward, oddly ashamed, at fault. "I'm sorry, Baba."

The scene concludes:

And suddenly the sound of his pet name, uttered by his father as he has been accustomed to hearing it all his life, means something completely new, bound up with a catastrophe he has unwittingly embodied for years. "Is that what you think of when you think of me?" Gogol asks him.

"Not at all," his father says eventually, one hand going to his ribs, a habitual gesture that has baffled Gogol until now. "You remind me of everything that followed."

As one whose own cultural adjustments had more to be made in other directions -- US to Asia, Establishment to '60's counter-culture -- I can say that although the details are quite different, the conflicts of perception and adjustment he undergoes mirror many of my own experiences as well as those of lots of my friends. In this way, The Namesake seems to me a quintessentially American book, this being a country always somewhat in flux socially, culturally, generationally. What seemed to me particularly South Asian in her telling is less the details, lush as they are, as the tenderness she shows towards the individual members of the family in their longings, in the restraint of their expressions, and in their struggles to find their own individual spaces and identities across a double continental divide.

It is this gentle handling of Gogol and his parents that made this book such a pleasure for me to read. Yet it is in no way an overly sweet or sentimental portrayal. The family is imperfect, their problems difficult, Gogol's search for identity leading him down somewhat cold and convoluted paths at times. No easy answers are offered, yet the ending, which is by no means pat, points towards a future in which Gogol may find a way to incorporate his family's past into his identity without losing himself in it.

I had thoroughly enjoyed Interpreter of Maladies and eagerly looked forward to reading Jhumpa Lahiri's first novel. At the end of September when she stopped in Berkeley on her book tour, I was there to hear her read a good-sized segment from The Namesake . I liked what I heard and took my place at the back of a long, winding line to get a signed copy. On my request, she graciously agreed to sign her name in Bangla.

It took me a couple of months to get around to reading the book. But after finishing the novel, I was left with a curious feeling of disillusionment. Almost akin to a broken heart. Perhaps my high expectations are to blame for this feeling of letdown.

Before I had a chance to read the book for myself, I had noticed that The Namesake received some harsh criticism, especially from some Bengalis. Some have attacked the book for portraying Bengalis poorly or for not being representative of certain Bengali immigrant archetypes. I do not share these ways of looking at the novel. I do not expect a writer to work with the burden of sociological representation on her shoulders. Readers who look for that would be better served by journalism or scholarly stud ies. I also do not feel that a writer's work should be judged on providing a model for how immigrants should live. So I find it hard to accept critiques that take Jhumpa Lahiri to task for not representing a certain type of offspring of immigrant parent s. We all know there are many kinds of American born deshi children, just as there are many kinds of those of us who came here as adults or near-adults.

Starting in the mid-60s, for example, nearly all my siblings moved to the U.S. and if you count cousins, there are probably a hundred of us scattered across North America. We have now, among us, everything from folks who consider themselves nothing but American as well as those who recognize their subcontinental roots to be vital. We have atheists, non-religious people, nominal Muslims, praying Muslims, Christians, and people who probably believe in that California sort of religion ("spiritual, not rel igious"). We are gay, straight, single, coupled, married, and divorced. We have doctors, engineers, waitresses, teachers, businesspeople. We have PhD's as well as those who haven't gone to college. We have had a cousin shot to death while working in a gas station as well as undocumented immigrants who have lived with the fear of deportation.

While I await the publication of stories that represent this, and even wider, swaths of the deshi immigrant experience, I have no problem with Ms Lahiri focusing on Gogol Ganguly, the son of Ashoke and Ashima, who grows up in suburban Boston, grapples wi th his name and identity, and learns how to negotiate his way through both his immediate family, his extended 'family' of Bengalis, and mainstream America. This is the story she chose to tell; what I would like to judge her work on is how well she pulled off telling this particular story.

The Namesake is an ambitious novel, trying to chart the life of a first-generation immigrant boy, from his birth in the late 1960s to his life as an architect in New York in the 1990s. The story of 32 years of Gogol's life is told in just short of 300 pages.

The author starts the novel powerfully with Ashima and Ashoke as relatively new immigrants in Cambridge, Massachusetts. We see them birth their child, move to the Boston suburbs, we see Gogol as a child on his first day in kindergarten, his fourteenth birthday, his college years at Yale, and then in a series of relationships in adulthood after he's finished grad school and started working life as an architect.

In this narrative written in memoir style, we are given quick summaries of many years and snapshots of life at key turning points. What to summarize and what to dramatize are the choices faced by any memoirist. And it is here first that I would question some of the author's choices. Once Gogol becomes an adult (when he goes off to Yale), the focus of the author is on a person almost entirely defined by his relationship to either his family or his lovers. I think this reduces Gogol's complexity and tends to make his character one dimensional. While in college, does Gogol not go through what undergrads regularly undergo, such as the struggle to figure out what to study, and does he not have anything else pulling at him, academically, culturally, even perhaps politically? Does he not have friends?

Indeed it seems that Gogol does not have a single friend. While most people in college may be part of social circles, there are no doubt loners too. Gogol seems to be one of those. And perhaps because he does not have friends, his relationships with his lovers become the center of his life. And this may be why he is such a sad, almost pathetic, character. But I don't really understand how he turned out this way. To do that, I'd need more insight into him, perhaps a closer look at his formative years, his adolescence. But we aren't given much of that. We visit him only on his fourteenth birthday and join him on a brief foray into a party among college students at MIT where a girl kisses him for the first time.

I have read other books where 30 years of life have been attempted to be fit into 300 pages, and I have found some of them sprawling because the author tried to give us too many dimensions of the protagonist's life. Here Jhumpa Lahiri seems to have chos en a tighter focus, and I appreciate that choice. But in this effort, she might have inadvertently sacrificed her protagonist's fullness. For that matter, we are given a short summary of Moushumi's life and she comes off as a much fuller character.

The issue of tight focus takes me to the key device she has used to focus this book, Gogol's identity in relationship to his name and namesake, Nikolai Gogol. At first I found myself thinking, neat. She started it off very well with the story of Ashoke 's survival from the train wreck. But my feeling is that if you're going to use such a device, tread lightly. It is hammered home so many times that it seems to be a stand in for Gogol's entire existential crisis. Those of us with multiple names grappl e with many similar issues of identity (I myself have had to deal with three or four in my lifetime), and I suppose someone could be as obsessed with the issue of his name as Gogol. But then I would have wanted the novel to reach beyond its calm realism and dip into the well of mental illness. Right now, it tends to seem like a boy looking for a way to make a big deal out of nothing. That may be okay in adolescence, but you'd figure once he's an adult, he'd grow up.

A final note on something that Ms. Lahiri is exceptionally good at, her use of detail and description. I am, like many other readers, astounded by her ability to use and show detail to such effect. A part of me is envious because I only wish I could pull off writing like that. I lived in Boston for many years of my life, traveled the Amtrak between there and New York often enough, and the author took me back to those places and train journeys. While in many places I enjoyed what she did with the detail, there were unfortunately many other moments where I thought she overdid it. One of my writing teachers once taught me that if you're going to describe something, find a key piece to focus on, direct the reader's gaze. I wish that Jhumpa Lahiri had in many instances done precisely that instead of layering paragraphs of description. Leaving those out, she could have given us more story and especially more of Gogol's inner life.

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