The Namesake

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The Namesake is the highly touted first novel by Jhumpa Lahiri which explores much of the same emotional and cultural territory as her Pulitzer Prize winning short story collection Interpreter of Maladies: the sensitivities and nuances of being a member of a racial/national diaspora, caught between two conflicting cultures (each with highly distinct religious, social, and ideological differences).

Plot and characters of The Namesake

As with earlier traditions of ethnic literature, The Namesake is really an investigation of an entire family unit that serves as a form of cultural ventriloquism, rather than the Western narrative standard of following a single protagonist on a quest.

The Gangulis are fairly educated Indian-Americans living in the Northeast:

• Asoke Ganguli, the patriarch, experiences a near death experience of a sort. Prior to embarking for the United States in the 1960's, he is involved in a devastating train accident; he survives only by holding up the tattered remains of a short-story collection by Russian author Nikolai Gogol.

• Asima Ganguli, the matriarch, is initally plagued by insecurities of being in America. Unlike Asoke, Asima finds even the most basic elements of a homogenized American society difficult to accept (Christmas, drivers licenses, etc).

• Gogol Ganguli, in many ways the begotten son, grows up tormented by identity crises, stemming from his desire to assimilate to American culture, but at the same time being both physically and psychologically reminded of his ethnic roots.

The novel examines Gogol's love affairs with three important women:

• Ruth, his college sweetheart. She is a Caucasian woman with whom Gogol first deeply loves. They soon separate after Ruth spends both spring and summer terms in England doing literary scholarship. She embodies much of what Gogol desires: white, affluent, liberal.

• Maxine, a member of a highly liberal Manhattanite family, becomes Gogol's first love. She is often regarded as a controversial character in the novel, as numerous book critics and academics interpreted her character as exemplifying the same clueless condescension inherent to liberal multiculturalist ideology; that is, her willingness to "understand" Gogol creates in itself a distance between each other because it rigidly maintains that their relationship is not a matter of deep, personal intimacy, but of larger, irrelevant cultural divides (her bewilderment as to why she wasn't invited to attend Ashoke's ash-scattering into the Ganges, for example). However, to many, Maxine is a sincere character - a woman who truly loves Gogol, despite the neglection of her racial privilege.

• Moushimi, a woman with whom Gogol met as a child, grew up in England. She and Gogol have much in common, including ethnic and cultural heritage. She finds that her struggles with cultural identification were essentially solved by her deep interest in French language and culture, especially her brief expatriate life during her stay in Paris. They fall in love and agree to get married. Unfortunately, their marriage collapses after Moushimi has an affair with a man she met years before. Both of them come to ths same realization that their mutual anxieties surrounding their ethnic identities is not enough to keep them together. The novel ends with their divorce, and her departure for Paris, with Gogol realizing that the only identity he can truly build upon is neither Indian nor American, but entirely his own.