The Namesake

It seems that young writers these days are masters of short stories and never novels. After The Memory Keeper's Daughter, which started out so promisingly before wandering unfocused from character to character, I question the ideas that any successful short story writer can simply pick up and write a novel.

But The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri is certainly an exception. Or perhaps a new twist on the same old problems. The detail of the book is startling - so many scenes filled with vivid, telling details that I did not think Lahiri could sustain such a pace. And yet, the novel is filled with moment after moment, like a million tiny climaxes within a short story that never ends. The story spans four decades, yet the main characters always feel so deliberately drawn, so delicate and present in the exact moment of their life.

The difficulty is that the tone here is so lacking in emotion and reliant on detail that at times it seems as if the characters feel nothing at all. All grief is expressed in action, such as clearing out a dead father's apartment or shaving one's head as a sign of mourning. Love is rarely expressed. In this Bengali family built upon an arranged marriage, the two lovers of the book do not even speak each other's names. They are distant and only slowly become accustomed to each other, and never in the book do you see a declaration of love. Their love is meant to be apparent only in that they stay together and raise a family, but frankly this does not come across in the book. It is not until one has lost the other that you feel that they truly had a life together, instead of a life side-by-side.