The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri

“On a sticky August evening two weeks before her due date, Ashima Ganguli stands in the kitchen of a Central Square apartment, combining Rice Krispies and Planters peanuts and chopped red onion in a bowl. She adds salt, lemon juice, thin slices of green chili pepper, wishing there were mustard oil to pour into the mix. Ashima has been consuming this concoction throughout her pregnancy, a humble approximation of the snack sold for pennies on Calcutta sidewalks and on railway platforms throughout India, spilling from newspaper cones. Even now that there is barely space inside her, it is the one thing she craves. Tasting from a cupped palm, she frowns; as usual, there’s something missing.”

The opening lines of The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri.

In many ways, these lines represent the things I liked best about this novel: the specificity of the ingredients; the collision of cultures as Ashima seeks to replicate the Indian dish with American brands; memory’s evocative detail of the newspaper cones; and the suggestion of the larger issues troubling the character, for whom, “as usual, there’s something missing.” Though Ashima, it turns out, is not the central character of the novel; rather, it is the about-to-be born child that she is carrying. And that choice strikes me as less than ideal, and perhaps symptomatic of the novel’s problems. I don’t mean to suggest that every novel must open with its principal character in the very first sentence, but I do wonder if this one would have been better off doing so. The fact that it does not, despite its bildungsroman nature, suggests (at least in retrospect) the lack of narrative focus that characterizes the book.

The book’s larger problems aside, I think this opening is lovely. I like the way in which the immigrant Ashima is seeking to recover an aspect of her homeland, making use of her expertise in cooking to creatively bridge the gap between past and present. And I like how her ingenuity is inevitably thwarted, at least in a small degree, by the lack of necessary ingredients. I especially like the fact that her “concoction” is a “humble approximation” of the original; one would think that a cheap snack sold on the streets and railway platforms would be pretty humble already. The fact that this imitation is even more humble speaks both to the evocative power of the original for Ashima, for whom it is undoubtedly bound up with all kinds of other memories, and also to the character’s own natural humility (for I read that “humble” as an expression of the character’s own judgment of her efforts).

I find it especially satisfying that, after the descriptive care lavished on the snack, it is never named. Perhaps this is another indication of the degree to which it is a humble approximation, but it is also entirely appropriate to the novel, which will be very concerned with names, lack of names, and the differing roles that names play in the old culture and the new. One almost begins to sense the overwhelming nature of American consumer culture when the brands which are the constituent parts are prominently named but the resulting concoction, which presumably has only an Indian name with no American equivalent, is not. The name’s absence seems to anticipate the loss of the baby’s Indian name, selected by his grandmother back in India, but lost in the mails on its way to America.

To my mind, though, this book has a forest-and-trees problem. While the writing and observational detail are frequently wonderful, there’s insufficient control of the larger narrative; the story meanders and, for me, fails to cohere into a unified work. It seems to me that the whole is rather less than the sum of the parts.