Hi! One of my goals for this year is to write about the things I read and watch more in an effort be more conscientious about how I'm consuming them. I've tried this before on my Goodreads and Letterboxd accounts, but I kept on tailing off, so I'm hoping that writing for an audience of people I know instead of just posting into a void will keep me on this. My aim to is to write five random thoughts on the subject for each post, mainly because that seems easier than writing essays or reviews, both of are formats that I have no experience with. For now, I'm also going to try writing only about works where I feel like I have moderately interesting thoughts to add, so expect a lot of posts about books on American history and politics (I promise I read about stuff other than that)
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Why did I want to read The Namesake? Mainly because I felt like I really should have read it by this. It's one of the most prominent pieces of media about post-1965 immigration, it's one of the most prominent pieces of media about Asian-Americans, and with the potential exception of Never Have I Ever, I'd argue that it is the most prominent piece of media about Indian-Americans. (Or I guess if you're feeling like a troll, maybe it's Kal Ho Naa Ho.) When I mentioned to my mother I was reading The Namesake, she asked me, "isn't it a bit late in life"? I agree with her - it is weird that it took me so long to get to this.
This was my third Jhumpa Lahiri book, my first two having been her first release, The Interpreter of Maladies, and her latest one, Whereabouts. I read Interpreter while in college. Thinking about it nearly six years after I read, I have to say that it’s left no lasting impression on me, considering I don’t remember any of the stories. Apparently at the time, I gave it three stars on Goodreads and wrote in my journal, “it was good, but it gets repetitive reading about Ivy League-educated Bengali immigrants who live in Boston”. My guess is that critique was rooted in me feeling that Lahiri should’ve done a fuller job representing the diversity of the Indian-American experience. In hindsight I think that’s unfair, partially because I’m less precious about representational issues, but mostly because there has been so much media created by South Asian Americans over the last six years that if Lahiri wants to write about one very specific niche in the community, power to her because there are a dozen other people now doing the exact same thing with their own groups. I read Whereabouts last, and it surprisingly ended up resonating with me more than The Namesake and Interpreter. As an alleged Adult living in the Big City, who spends quite a bit of time willingly and unwillingly alone, her mediation on the balance between loneliness and solitude through the perspective of a woman the age of my mother spoke to me in a way that her yuppie second-generation Indian-American characters didn’t.
So, onto The Namesake. I think I liked The Namesake? I know I didn’t hate it, which is not how I normally feel about stories about angsty young men, but there were still a lot of parts where it was a slog to read. I generally enjoyed when Lahiri focused on the Bengali characters who were not Gogol, with the most compelling parts for me being Ashoke and Ashima’s emigration to America and the Ganguli family, particularly Ashmina, coping with Ashoke’s death. On that note, I was reading a review of the movie version of The Namesake which argues that the movie improves on the book by making Ashmima the main character instead of Gogol. I haven’t watched the movie so don’t know if that’s actually the case, but after reading the book, I agree that her story is more compelling.
My fundamental issue with the book is that I didn’t find Gogol, particularly the angsty, sad-boy, young adult, version of him to be particularly interesting[1]. He’s not very likable, which, to be fair, I don’t think he’s meant to be, but while I guess being insecure about your weird name is a fundamental part of the second-generation immigrant experience, I don’t find it to be interesting to read on and on and on about. I felt similarly about his awkwardness in trying to acclimate himself to the mostly white New York upper-middle class and contrasting that with his Bengali family. I just didn’t find the experience of negotiating microaggressions and inadequacy over his upbringing to make for compelling reading, especially in Lahiri’s detached style. I liked reading about him more when he becomes a more likable character after his father’s death and during his ill-fated marriage with Moushumi. I don’t love that it took him going through some traumatic events for me to find him interesting m, but it goes back to me liking the family drama aspect of this book more than the coming of age one.
This book is old! It’s weird to think about since 2003 doesn’t feel like it was so long ago, and Jhumpa Lahiri is still pretty prominent, but this book is 20 years old! The first thing that I was struck by while reading this was that chapter 1, when Gogol was born, was set in 1968. My mom was born in 1968. All the second-gen characters in this book are old enough to be my parents, which makes it interesting to me. One of my favorite demographic fun facts is that of 2019 the median age of a U.S.-born Indian-American was 13 [2]. If Gogol Ganguli was alive in 2019, he’d be 49. Considering that there wasn’t mass immigration [3] from to the US before the mid-20th century, in a lot of ways, this is a book about the first generation of Indian-Americans becoming adults, which just makes it absolutely fascinating from a historical perspective.
Off the last point, one of the most fun parts about reading this book was making the comparison between Gogol’s, and presumably Lahiri’s, upbringing in the ‘70s/’80s and mine in ‘00s/’10s. Evidently, not much changed in the intervening 30 years. Indian parties where the parents are on the upper floors talking about political bullshit while the kids awkwardly are in the basement are apparently exactly the same. Huddling up in random suburban community centers and high school gyms for cultural events has been a thing for almost a half century evidently. The same holds true for the non-Indian parts too. Northeastern suburbs - basically the same. School field trips - basically the same. The Northeast corridor rail experience - basically the same. The main difference I did notice, other than the obvious technological stuff, is that outside of Gogol and his immediate family, almost all the characters are white. Some of that is definitely a reflection of Gogol’s angst over identity, but it does strike me as plausible for an Indian-American yuppie in the 1990s in a way that’d be extremely weird in the 2020s.
Of course, by far the most infuriating part of this book is reading that an NYU grad student could afford an East Village apartment by herself and a junior architect’s salary + a grad student stipend is enough to buy a one-bedroom in Kips Bay.
