Life in Exile

• Share

You could call Jhumpa Lahiri's The Namesake (Houghton Mifflin; 291 pages) a multigenerational saga of the immigrant experience, but that makes it sound like a tedious prime-time mini-series instead of what it is: a delicate, moving first novel. It begins in Cambridge, Mass., with the birth of a son to the Gangulis, an Indian couple who recently arrived in America. New England seems a chilly dreamworld to them compared with their native Calcutta. "Ashoke and Ashima live the lives of the extremely aged," Lahiri writes, "those for whom everyone they once knew and loved is lost, those who survive and are consoled by memory alone."

The Namesake is a novel about distance, geographic and emotional, but it's also about time. The decades zoom by in a parade of poignant tableaux, and the Gangulis' son Gogol grows up to become a successful architect, but he is never quite comfortable in his own skin. He feels neither Indian nor American, without even a true home to feel homesick for. But a series of tableaux, however poignant, does not a novel make. In her Pulitzer-prizewinning story collection, Interpreter of Maladies, Lahiri mastered the art of ending on a freeze-frame, leaving her characters suspended in a moment of ambiguity and ambivalence. It doesn't work quite as well at novel length, and The Namesake feels like three-quarters of a book — albeit three-quarters of a splendid one.