Culture clash, here I come. Review on Namesake, The - Jhumpa Lahiri

It was to be expected that Jhumpa Lahiri would give the issue her full attention after tackling it piecemeal in the Interpreter of Maladies. The result is a book called the Namesake that is as confused as the lead character.

Gogol Ganguli is named after Nikolai Gogol a russian writer. All his life he feels no kinship for the name, thinks it's weird and cant relate to it. He changes his name only to revert to it after a quasi midlife crisis. The ongoing theme of the book is the identity crisis Gogol faces both as a child growing up in an Indian family in the USA and also as a name wronged teenager.

Lahiri unfortunately loads up too many emotional barrels for the poor guy to fire and none really hits the mark. It's not so much that the culture clash is stereotyped, the american descriptions are somewhat hackneyed or that the characters are somewhat paper thin. The book really never evolves into something beyond the story it seeks to tell.

To begin with gone is the mellifluous rendering. The namesake is an arduous journey through distinctly ugly print with a narrator who is exasperating and just plain difficult at times. No you won't reach for the dictionary ever but it just doesn't read smoothly.

Lahiri adopts a dry vigorless voice ostensibly to keep from being judgemental as she sets up the culture clash but she ends up being a hindrance to knowing the true characters. Also Lahiri's idea of a culture clash is comical. It's pretty much all about food. Payesh takes on proscuitto is about the most charitable description I can come up with.

The idea that a culture lives in the minds of its people as much as their stomachs is ignored totally. Also Lahiri succumbs to the temptation of viewing the americans through India tinted glasses and despite her best efforts cannot avoid being judgemental especially when setting up a plot device like an American girlfriend asking Gogol if he still wants to go on a vacation after his father's death.

Really I have met a lot of Americans and they aren't so heartless. If you thought only the Americans were skewed, you are wrong. Lahiri adds an Indian girlfriend to the confused mess whom Gogol marries almost in a home-is-best epiphany. It helps ofcourse that their dinners consist exclusively of pasta and other un-Indian things thereby bridging the gaps between now and then.

Ofcourse what Indian wedding happens without the hapless reader drowning upto his ears in exotica details and eccentricities assumed to be charming because they are so foreign. Lahiri also makes a fair share of logical errors my favourite being the sex with the doughed hands.

I suppose the only thing she does get right is the portrayal of Gogol's parents as strangers in a stranger land. I have been through that and know what it feels like. The lonely professorial life with not enough of Indian ballasts (remember this is the 70's) can be pretty rough on anybody especially a newly wed family when the couple has not spent their formative years here. She could have set out to write a book about loneliness, the feeling of exile and then acceptance but ends up dishing out an Indian family values manifesto.

The characters are inextricably Indian, relentlessly pigheaded in not heeding their son's expectations and warm and all forgiving when the time comes. The son himself whittles away a lot of empathy we might have had for him by persistent, boring and irritating ruminations about why he was denied a better name. I mean it's a name.

Ultimately the story ends on a confused note with no clear idea about which culture is tops but then the name has nothing to do with that anyway. So you end up wondering what point she was trying to make. I guess perhaps The God of Small Things set the bar impossibly high for Indian literature. Even if you make the concession that it wasn't about the immigrant experience the only other thing that springs to mind is the crude gawd help us 'The inscrutable americans'.

We still have to wait for an Indian Kundera to etch out exile in a heartstoppingly poetic language while still chuckling away at the neuroses it implies.