The Namesake

This 2003 novel by Jhumpa Lahiri captures both late 20th century American immigrant experience and a timeless coming of age narrative, with all the complexities, conflicts, confusions, and compromises that both stories entail.

The immigration of an Indian family to the American Northeast is complicated by the father’s love of Russian literature and the somewhat accidental naming of his son after Nikolai Gogol, transforming an immigration and assimilation story into one of more broadly multicultural significance. The three cultures-- Indian, American, and Russian—could hardly be more different. Yet Gogol must navigate himself and his identity through these conflicting shoals of influence to find his way toward authentic selfhood.

His parents were joined in a traditional arranged marriage and remained faithful to each other throughout their life together. Gogol and his sister, born and raised in the U.S., marry for romantic love. Gogol, by the time he marries, has already engaged in pre-marital sexual relationships, including an affair with a married woman. His own marriage to another second-generation Bengali immigrant ends in divorce after he learns of her adulterous affair.

Marital fidelity is just one manifestation of a larger fidelity theme—fidelity to the past, family, and cultural heritage, not to mention one’s name. Gogol resents his name, and, it seems, his Indian heritage, which sets him apart from his American peers. He loves his parents, though, and constantly struggles between loyalty to them and rebellion against them.

At an early age, he rejects the formal name, Nikhil, that his parents seek to bestow on him, preferring Gogol, but later, as an adolescent he comes to hate the name Gogol and eventually changes his legal name to Nikhil. Such is the confusion and conflict that plagues his struggle to define his own identity, as a Bengali, as an American, and as the son of a father who reveres a Russian writer.

Grief-stricken by his father’s sudden death, Gogol finds consolation in his family and Indian heritage. Later he falls in love with, and marries, a Bengali woman, whom he has known from childhood, after his mother urges him to call her, a kind of compromise between a traditional arranged marriage and a Western style romantic marriage. They even observe the traditional Bengali wedding rituals.

Though Gogol is the main protagonist, the novel is structured by shifting points of view--from the perspective of his mother as a newly married woman in a strange country, where her husband is an engineering student at MIT, to his own perspective as a youth and young man finding his way in his multicultural world, to the perspective of his Bengali wife, Moushumi, a feminist studying for her doctorate in French literature (yet another cultural influence in Gogol’s life).

This organization throws into relief the contrast, not only between first and second generation immigrants, but also between the traditional Indian wife and the modern “liberated” wife. It’s hard to say which is the greater burden—obedience and fidelity or modernity and liberation.

In the end, Gogol, having rejected two serious Western girlfriends and divorced his Bengali wife, seeks reconciliation with his past, his family, his culture, and his namesake. At the age of 32, for the first time, he opens the book by Nikolai Gogol his father had given him long before and begins to read.

We can only speculate on how the young man will come to terms with all that he has inherited, all that he has chosen, all that he has become, and all that he may yet be. What one hopes is that he will come to accept himself as a global citizen.