Introducing The Namesake
“They were things for which it was impossible to prepare but which one spent a lifetime looking back at, trying to accept, interpret, comprehend. Things that should never have happened, that seemed out of place and wrong, these were what prevailed, what endured, in the end.” 
&nbsp;
The Namesake is Jhumpa Lahiri’s intimate and at times heartbreaking novel, published in 2003. Like the book that launched her career, the shimmering, deeply felt (and Pulitzer Prize-winning) story collection Interpreter of Maladies, it contends with the concept of dual identity, a phenomenon that is all-too-familiar in many immigrant families. While the author was born in London, and immigrated to the United States at a young age, Lahiri’s family hails from the Indian region of West Bengal, in the east of the country. As Lahiri said in her article “<a href="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.newsweek.com/my-two-lives-106355&amp;sa=D&amp;source=docs&amp;ust=1685562747896201&amp;usg=AOvVaw2uIgpmKR6SC6SnEIGH5y_3">My Two Lives</a>,” “Like many immigrant offspring I felt intense pressure to be two things, loyal to the old world and fluent in the new, approved of on either side of the hyphen.” She unfolds this concept and dissects it in this novel, engaging not only with her own experiences as a child of Bengali parents, but with the experiences of siblings and parents as well. Following the protagonist, Gogol, through adolescence and adulthood contending with identity, The Namesake is a multi-generational story about the Ganguli’s, a Bengali-American family, as they traverse continents, relationships, and fight for self-actualization.
The book opens with a young couple, Ashima and Ashoke, and their departure from India in the wake of their arranged marriage. They settle in Cambridge, Massachusetts as Ashoke attends MIT. After working to get to know each other and build a small community in a foreign place, the narrative opens to include the birth of their children, first Gogol and later Sonia. The focus soon transitions to Gogol, or as he would prefer to be called, Nikhil. Gogol struggles with his strange name, an homage to his father, Ashoke’s, <a href="https://timesarrow.org/author/nikolai-gogol">favorite existentialist writer</a>, and fights against his ties to Calcutta; as a young man exploring Yale and then Columbia, he wants nothing more than to be an American boy. It is a deeply revealing and intimate text that brings to light how the intersections of culture and personhood, independence and dependence, can mold the lives of children of immigrant parents and the parents themselves. One of The Namesake’s strongest accomplishments is its continued focus and validation not only on how dual identity affects Gogol, but how Gogol’s resistance to his culture, and to Ashoke’s beloved Russian literature and therefore Ashoke himself, affects and hurts his parents.
Though Lahiri focuses strongly on the effect of transcontinental immigration on families and psyches, many readers of this book will be able to identify with each of the Ganguli’s struggling in their own ways to realize the fluidity and mutability of identity. Gogol’s character lies at the forefront of this struggle, and he is uniquely primed to contend with themes of identity. His namesake, the writer Nikolai Gogol, is famous for stories that wrestle with identity: in <a href="https://timesarrow.org/work/the-nose">“The Nose,”</a> a man loses all sense of who is and his place in society upon waking up one day with nose having suddenly disappeared; in <a href="https://timesarrow.org/work/the-overcoat">“The Overcoat,”</a> a story which holds special meaning and significance to Ashoke, the protagonist Akaky’s sense of identity and self-importance is dependent on the quality of his overcoat, and his personality is even completely changed as consequence of the loss of his overcoat. In The Namesake, Gogol’s life, though much less absurdist than our favorite Russian writer, runs through similar scenes of his identity being challenged, changed, and redefined as a consequence of outside forces. In the presence of his parents, Gogol suddenly finds himself aligning himself to his ties to his Indian culture, yet at Yale, at his first college party, he introduces himself for the first time as Nikhil and tries desperately to distance himself from India and connect more intimately with American life and custom. Describing his first kiss, the book reads: “‘It wasn’t me,’ he nearly says. But he doesn’t tell them that it hadn’t been Gogol who’d kissed Kim. That Gogol had had nothing to do with it” (Lahiri 96). The novel follows Gogol through his adolescence and into his adulthood, where his ties both to India and America are grown, severed, transformed, and recontextualized.
Ashima and Ashoke contend firsthand with the transition into a new life in Massachusetts, and the fallout from that transition works its way into the lives and character of their children, most notably in their son’s seemingly-odd name, Gogol. Initially meant only as a “placeholder” name, the distance to their family in India prevents their oldest living relative from carrying out the traditional naming ceremony. Hence, “Gogol.”
Meanwhile, the isolation associated with this immigrant family’s experience is only compounded by slow and cumbersome communication methods, such as spotty long-distance calls and “snail mail.” Ashima, for her part, embodies a specific brand of loneliness and isolation—indeed, her circumstances might even seem extreme to westerners: she followed her new husband, whom she had never met before, away from her family and across the world to a new life in an unknown land: “She cries after the mailman’s visit because there are no letters from Calcutta. She cries when she calls Ashoke at his department and he does not answer” (Lahiri 34). Ashoke leaves her alone in their new apartment while he attends MIT, and though she finds a small community of other Indian people, the heft of her separation from her family and history is one of the most deeply felt parts of the book. After Gogol’s birth, looking down at her new child and surrounded by strangers, she ruminates on her new life:
“For as grateful as she feels for the company… these acquaintances are only substitutes for the people who really ought to be surrounding them. Without a single grandparent or parent or uncle or aunt at her side, the baby’s birth, like most everything else in America, feels somehow haphazard, only half true” (Lahiri 24).
Ashoke, as well, must find a way to build a life in America. Several defining moments in his life, and Ashima’s, arrive belatedly, relayed through the phone with bad reception. They make all these sacrifices and more to give their lives, and their children’s lives, more opportunity. The Namesake is a uniquely intimate novel because all the characters are treated equally, with their suffering, happiness, losses, and gains all weighed against one another. We can sympathize for Gogol while lamenting Ashima’s isolation or Ashoke’s inability to truly bond with his son.
The search for identity lasts, for many, our entire lives, it changes, deepens, and occasionally dislocates as our lives unfold. In this way, we may think of ourselves as more than one person as we live our lives, and one of the great gifts of The Namesake is that it reveals in an impactful and deeply-felt way how often immigrant families live dual identities, inhabiting more than one sense of self at a time.
-Abby Edgecumbe
&nbsp;