bb book club the namesake

the namesake

By Emily Talpey

The act of naming, a cultural tradition that exists almost universally, is one that is often explored as a dichotomy in literature. You may recall reading excerpts from The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in 10th grade English, or still get confused between the characters Macbeth and Macduff while taking Shakespeare I at Barnard. Either way, having read these texts or not, all of us have some sort of relationship to our names which is usually highly personal and sometimes conflicting with who we imagine ourselves to be.

In her novel The Namesake, a coming-of-age story that recounts the encounter between a boy and his birth name, Jhumpa Lahiri engages with the struggle of a personal identity at odds with a hand-me-down name torn from a Russian book on the Ganguli family bookshelf. The Gangulis recently moved to Boston from Calcutta, India in pursuit of prestigious jobs at MIT. The couple impulsively decide upon the name Gogol for their unborn son because Ashoke, Gogol’s father, believes that the Russian author’s book of short stories helped save his life many years ago.

As Gogol grows older, he realizes that his given name subscribes neither to his Indian roots nor to the conventional “Jacobs” or “Michaels” many of his classmates call them

selves by. Gogol’s impression of not belonging causes him to withdraw both from other Indian-American students and white urban New England from which he feels increasingly estranged. Per consequence, Gogol makes an official, legal change to Nikhil, the Russian author’s first name, as he feels it more closely matches the American name “Nick.”

Yet as time goes on, Lahiri’s protagonist cannot seem to shake the sense that he has somehow betrayed his parents, as Nikhil develops a new persona—one who “grows a goatee, starts smoking Camel Lights at parties and, while writing papers and before exams, discovers Elvis Costello and Brian Eno and Charlie Parker.” These brands and activities, which help Nikhil feel as though he fits in, in many ways do help him to succeed: he goes on to complete an Ivy League education and work as

an architect under the guise of this new persona. Meanwhile, Gogol’s parents, although also successful in their careers, describe their foreignness as “a sort of lifelong pregnancy—a perpetual wait, a constant burden, a continuous feeling out of sorts,” which is shared by Nikhil/ Gogol.

In this riveting narrative which deals with notions of cultural identity, tradition, and familial expectation, Lahiri creates a world which delves into the intricacies of a family’s life caught between the discordant perceptions of themselves and from others. Yet beneath these complex anxieties lies the story of something much more simple—the hopes, desires, and regrets mirrored in both a son and his family as they all head forward in time, immigrants of their pasts, grappling with an urgency of a present identity which can perhaps exist in multiple time signatures.