In her debut novel of accident and happenstance, Jhumpa Lahiri revisits the themes that propelled her nine Pulitzer Prize winning short stories in Interpreter of Maladies. The episodic inquiry has given way to a gentle-paced, two-generational narrative. The dark corners left tantalising unlit in those tales have now been meticulously mapped. The abrupt folds in those narratives have been ironed out, the devotion to drama has evened out into a diarist’s preoccupation with minutiae. In this disappointing novel of immigration and adjustment, a young man’s unease about his given names provides a peg for Lahiri to chronicle the process of balancing ancestral loyalties and new engagements. Gogol was never meant to sally forth into childhood named after a dead Russian writer. When he was born to Ashoke and Ashima Ganguli, both newly moved to Boston from Calcutta, he a graduate student at MIT, she a homesick housewife, a name had already been chosen for him. Ashima’s grandmother had herself made a rare trip out of her Bengal home to airmail the chosen name. But the letter never arrived in Boston, a sudden stroke rendered the old lady incoherent, and the little one had to be temporarily christened after Ashoke’s favourite writer.
