Getting on first-name terms

FictionAn Indian couple, married according to the tradition of arranged matches, slowly come to know each other. Most of their life together develops not at home in India - a place where they holiday dutifully - but in the US, the country where the husband had earned most of his education.

They remain loyal to their family and customs - their friends tend to be other transplanted Bengalis - and to each other. But their firstborn, a son, quickly finds himself trying to escape one culture and to find himself in the new one, the one he has been born into.

Few first novels will be as widely anticipated as this one from a writer capable of drawing on the combined multiple strengths of the US and contemporary Indian fiction. Jhumpa Lahiri has established herself as a calm and sophisticated author of several fine short stories. Her collection, Interpreter of Maladies, won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. It demonstrated that her sure-footed grasp of the chaos and ambiguities of intimacy is unnervingly astute, although it did suggest that mood rather than narrative is her central preoccupation.

Such an abiding interest is not necessarily a weakness. Nor is a detached approach to characters. But there is a somewhat clinical whiff of the impersonal about this quiet, humourless novel in which the narrative focus lurches from character to character without ever really engaging with any of them.

That said, Lahiri, in common with those detectives who tend to wait until they have almost completed an investigation, has a knack of saving her strongest observation until the end. She also succeeds in using the continuous present tense while avoiding the narrative urgency it usually confers.

The Namesake could be the story of a young man, the son of Indian emigrants, who, born and raised in the US, is American in all but his physical appearance. It is not quite that, nor is it, only that. The man who begins life as "Baby Boy Ganguli", as his parents can not decide on a name, initially becomes an object of interest for that very reason: his name, or rather his lack of it. The imposition of a name changes this. And imposition it is. His father, a diligent academic and committed lover of Russian fiction, calls his son Gogol after the tragic but gifted Russian master.

So far, so interesting. Not a typical name for any baby, never mind an Indian one born in a rich culture with legions of exotic names to offer. Many would admire the man with sufficient imagination for such a choice. But the baby son soon grows into a boy with a profound dislike of his given name. Lahiri pursues the theme of cultural assimilation in characteristically restrained style; so cool is her approach that the reader might assume that a great deal more on the most contentious of themes is likely to follow.

It doesn't. Therein lies her assurance; she is not so much writing a study of cultural assimilation as a novel about the way individual lives develop and change. Although young Gogol, who legally - if ungratefully - changes his name as soon as he reaches 18 to the somewhat more romantic Nikhil, cannot transform his appearance.

Just when he has become almost part of a trendy Manhattan household, he has to swallow hard when a guest refers to his being Indian. It is left to others to argue that Nikhil, who is well aware of having long been on the run from the culture of his parents, to state that he is, indeed, an American.

American or not, he is an ineffectual, ordinary sort of guy whose career as an architect is singularly unconvincing, or at least does not interest Lahiri. Nor does she make him heroic. Instead, she cleverly ensures that the real hero, if there is one in this narrative of moods and passive lives, is Ashoke, the young man's father.

He is the most impressive character. Not through any particular action, but because of his response to an incident that happened in his youth. As a survivor of a horrific night-time rail disaster, Ashoke could always attribute his survival to the fact that unlike the other sleeping passengers who died, he was wide wake - reading Gogol. Hence the name he gave his son many years later at a time when official family directives concerning the baby's name had not arrived from India.

Many years later, after his father has told him the story behind his name, and after Ashoke's sudden death, his son recalls the time he had, as a little boy, taken an ambitiously long walk with his father across a Cape Cod breakwater. " 'Will you remember this day, Gogol?' his father had asked, turning back to look at him, his hands pressed like earmuffs to either side of his head. 'How long do I have to remember it?' " The child's response is blunt but believable.

The touch of genius rests in the reply Lahiri gives the father, as he says: "Try to remember it always . . . Remember that you and I made this journey, that we went together to a place where there was nowhere left to go."

There are further intuitive flashes in the novel. Such as when Gogol's mother, a convincingly drawn if sporadic character, suddenly widowed, realises that her husband's decision to spend three months working in a university in Ohio, leaving her in their Boston home, is to teach her to live alone. The same woman who, having arrived in the US as an Indian girl, leaves the country as a widow but intends to return as an American proud of her US citizenship. Gogol's mother can look to her now grown US children and remember it was from them that she first learnt how to celebrate Christmas, something that was never part of her Hindu culture.

Yet even allowing for such imagined touches, there are many lulls in the book. Lahiri follows Gogol through three of his main sexual relationships: the first is young love; the second a too easy passage into sophisticated and cultured New York life courtesy of a privileged household, and the third a marriage that begins as a pastiche traditional match with a fellow American child of Indian parents, a girl still recovering from sexual humiliation. It ends in a betrayal born of boredom.

The narrative drifts, or more accurately ebbs and flows. Intense detail is called upon to create a sense of Gogol's passage through his youth, and up to the age of 32. Moushumi, the girl he marries, appears to inhabit a story within - and apart - from the novel itself. It is one of the most disconcerting parts of the novel. Lahiri's detached interest in her characters tends to give the book a disjointed quality that counters any chance of its achieving a satisfying cohesion. Yet, just when it seems that the bored wife's former life and current dissatisfaction with her present has faltered alarmingly, Lahiri permits the character to note her husband's endearing carelessness.

The same applies to the magic reached in a late scene in which Nikhil is surprised by a flock of pigeons in a New York street.

Suddenly terrified, he ducks his head, feeling foolish afterward. None of the other pedestrians has reacted. He stops and watches as the birds shoot up, then land simultaneously on two neighbouring bare-branched trees . . .He has seen these graceless birds on windowsills and sidewalks, but never in trees.

A good, stylishly discreet novel certainly, but neither an exceptional nor even memorable one, The Namesake does, however, articulate precious moments of painful clarity - if all with the easy grace of hindsight.

Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times

The Namesake By Jhumpa Lahiri Flamingo, 291pp. £15.99