The Namesake: A Novel (Paperback)

There are many things that Lahiri did in this book that really impressed me, but since I'm giving the book four stars, I will focus on four:
1. her treatment of time
2. her usage of physical surroundings
3. the tense and perspective of the narrative
4. the universal and the particular

1. She is a master at shifting time. The book spans the life of Gogol from before his birth to about age thirty. It's very interesting to see how these characters change over the years. It was a relief for me to read a book that wasn't so episode oriented. This book "tells" a lot. Only a brilliant writer can get away with that and still manage to "show" you something. The time shifting is really what impressed me the most; the book has a great sense of movement. Lahiri gives us a moment by moment narrative and then sifts through months of events in a mere paragraph. She moves through years in just sentences.

2. The physical surroundings represent important ideas as well as represent what the characters are going through. Trains are a recurring location where significant things happen (Ashoke's accident; Gogol meets his first girlfriend). Gogol has an apartment in NYC that he's never in, representing his emptiness or whatever. The contrast of his 2nd girlfriend's parent's house to Gogol's parent's house represents a cultural divide. The fact that he gets married in a hotel represents the transience of his connection to his culture and of the marriage itself. And, of course there's the hotel in Ohio, although I won't give that away. This is a review not a synopsis.

3. Regarding the tense and perspective of the narrative. It is third person present tense. The present tense provides an immediacy while Lahiri at the same time manages to give the prose a meaningful voice. It is easy to lose a sense of authority without the past tense but Lahiri has a style that eloquently evades this. Third person perspective, as far as I'm concerned, is the superior form of narrative for a novel. Lahiri successfully brings us into the world of a young man and his parents. The only perspective that is lacking is that of the daughter, Sonia, Gogol's younger sister. But I think that one of the important things about the existence of the character Sonia is how she is a foil for Gogol.

4. The universal and the particular. What these character's all go through in The Namesake is the difficulty of identifying with the new world, the old one, or both. For those of us who don't have an old world to worry about identifying with, Lahiri still offers something about this experience that we can access. Read the book and find out what that is.

I give it four stars because the best is yet to come from this author.