This is certainly a novel that explores the concepts of cultural identity, of rootlessness, of tradition and familial expectation – as well as the way that names subtly (and not so subtly) alter our perceptions of ourselves – but it's very much to its credit that it never succumbs to the clichés those themes so often entail. Instead, Lahiri turns it into something both larger and simpler: the story of a man and his family, of his life and hopes, loves and sorrows … All Lahiri's observations jolt your heart with their freshness and truth. Her skill at deploying small physical details as a path into character is as exceptional as it is enjoyable.
Jhumpa Lahiri's quietly dazzling new novel, The Namesake, is that rare thing: an intimate, closely observed family portrait that effortlessly and discreetly unfolds to disclose a capacious social vision … In chronicling more than three decades in the Gangulis' lives, Ms. Lahiri has not only given us a wonderfully intimate and knowing family portrait, she has also taken the haunting chamber music of her first collection of stories and reorchestrated its themes of exile and identity to create a symphonic work, a debut novel that is as assured and eloquent as the work of a longtime master of the craft.
Written in an elegant hush – even upon rereading, there isn't a single burned raisin in the mix – Lahiri's stories traced out the lives of various Bengali-Americans suffering through various stages of lovelorn distress … The reader has begun to suspect that, graceful and spare as Lahiri's prose is, the simply put does not always equal the deeply felt. How much steely equipoise, after all, can one novel stand? Lahiri is a supremely gifted writer, but at moments in The Namesake it feels as though we've descended from the great Russians to Nick Adams to the PowerPoint voice-over … Its incorrigible mildness and its ungilded lilies aside, Lahiri's novel is unfailingly lovely in its treatment of Gogol's relationship with his father. This is the classic American parent-child bond – snakebit, oblique, half-mumbled – and in Lahiri's rendering, it touches on quiet perfection.
This grand sweep of 30 years is the plot of the novel, and it is punctuated with lightly comic scenes that give us glimpses into what it really means to live this life … As Gogol grows up, his first experiences with girls and sex are affecting, blissfully ordinary … This is a fine novel from a superb writer, but I do have to say that for all the illuminating moments and for all the precision of the details, the events of the book are oddly undramatic. Lahiri tells the story from a great narrative distance, and in a present tense that flattens the temporal context of events.
Lahiri writes beautifully controlled prose. She resorts to unusual word choices only when she needs them to fix an important moment in the reader's mind … In zeroing in on her hero's name to epitomize his identity crisis, Lahiri is, as usual, right on the money. Names have always been contested territory in immigrant families … Only near the end do we see that we've been expertly set up, that what passed for deft if slightly repetitive misadventures may really be the painful, Portnoyish loneliness of the immigrant's son. As at the end of ‘The Graduate,’ Lahiri gives us a romantic resolution and then leaves the camera running, overshooting her fairy-tale happy ending and granting us something wiser, darker, fuller.
Whereas Lahiri's short stories are filled with myriad miraculous, understated epiphanies, her novel strains for continuity by returning repeatedly to the themes of names and trains...Lahiri's insistence on making a connection with Nikolai Gogol, whose writing exemplifies a satirical taste for the absurd outlandishness of life, seems even more forced. It is particularly baffling in a writer whose tone is utterly suffused with sober realism … As in her short stories, these relationships give Lahiri a chance to do what she does best: sympathetic character portrayals and evenhanded, subtly nuanced explorations of the ebb and flow of a couple's dynamics. There's a heart-rending, almost elegiac tone and a constant mourning for the past that pervades The Namesake.
A tricultural collision awaits Gogol from his first few days of life. He has to endure a Russian name he cannot bear in an America he cannot penetrate with Indian parents he cannot fully accept or understand. All these ambiguities make for a novel of exquisite and subtle tension, spanning two generations and continents and a plethora of emotional compromises in between. Lahiri's subject, here and in her stories, is the loneliness of dislocation, and part of the reason her work succeeds is that her voice is as quiet as the atmosphere of displacement she evokes.
Like her subtle, precise stories, this novel moves quietly, eloquently across its central arc from the birth of a son to the death of the father … Lahiri's narrative moves lightly through time, landing on selected years, as one would move through the pages of a photo album. Her point of view shuttles between the parents and their son, and is richly sympathetic to both generations … In this post-modern era, culture fragments and ties of blood disappoint. Lahiri honors a bond stronger, and more transcendent than either of those.
The Namesake is so soft and subtle that it feels barbaric to heap on the praise it deserves. Everything about it – the richly drawn characters, the intergenerational sweep of the story, the exquisite tweak of details – signals a talent grand enough to warrant blinking lights, though first-time novelist Jhumpa Lahiri seems better suited to a spotlight implied by shadows … A master of withholding and letting details do the work that only details can do, Lahiri crafts a wondrous world where allegiances to family, heritage, and self linger without serving as prime motivators.
Though Lahiri writes with painstaking care, her dry synoptic style fails to capture the quirkiness of relationships. Many scenes cry out for dialogue that would enable her characters to cut loose from a buttoned-down world in which much is documented but little revealed … A disappointingly bland follow-up to a stellar story collection.
