The Namesake

The first thing that struck me about Jhumpa Lahiri's latest novel, The Namesake: A Novel was the odd fact that Lahiri's name is in larger font on the cover than the title of the book. Perhaps being a Pulitzer-Prize-winning author gives her name the right to such prominent placement, but to me, the story is what draws me in, not the name of the author.

That being said, The Namesake is a worthy story of two generations of an immigrant Indian family trying to navigate the strange social and cultural world of America, thousands of miles from home or, in the case of the second generation, stuck between parents from another world and an American childhood. Lahiri writes like an unabashed, snobbish Ivy League graduate, a woman who would be utterly malcontent in a small midwestern town. She's an elite New Yorker at heart and it oozes through the pages of her book, but somehow, I can manage to forgive her for it despite the references to the "universal" teenage experiences that only certain people who grew up in the Northeast seem to share (like a love of Bob Dylan and not Billy Joel).

I suppose Lahiri's work would be more remarkable to me if I hadn't grown up with Indian neighbors who vanished periodically to visit relatives in India. It never really seemed odd to me that their parents spoke a different language, that their mom wore saris and cooked yummy, odiferous Indian food or that they didn't celebrate Christmas. I remember thinking it was weird when my mom told me that their parents had an arranged marriage and I remember being jealous when one of the kids told me that when they went to worship, they didn't have to wear shoes (which made his temple way cooler than my church, where Sunday meant uncomfortable dresses, boring sermons and hard wooden pews). This unique cultural distinction that she's making was very much a satellite experience of my childhood; the immigrant experience is also an American one, a reminder that the very term American is as amorphous as Bill Clinton's definition of sexual relations.

This is one of those books that you finish reading and you're not exactly sure why you read it, but you're happy that you did. The characters are as insecure, accessible, intelligent and quirky as real people, not merely imprints or echoes of actual flesh and blood. I suppose that's Lahiri's true talent. She creates characters that resonate, striking common chords we all know in a story that we don't.

I recommend it.