And the family moves to the suburbs, buying a new house in a development. Ashima has a second child whom they name Sonali (soon to be called Sonia). Ashoke becomes a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is terrified at the prospect of raising a child ''in a country where she is related to no one, where she knows so little, where life seems so tentative and spare.''Īnd yet slowly, cautiously, the Gangulis make their way in America. Ashima tries to hide her disappointment when she first sees the tiny three-room apartment that is their home: so different, she thinks, from the homes she remembers from American movies like ''Gone With the Wind'' and ''The Seven-Year Itch.'' That is how Ashoke came to be a doctoral candidate in engineering in Boston, and that is how his new wife, Ashima - whom he married in an arranged ceremony - came to start a new life in a cold, gray city in New England. ''Before it's too late, without thinking too much about it first, pack a pillow and a blanket and see as much of the world as you can. It was on that same train that Ashoke met a stranger, who gave him the advice that would change his life: ''Do yourself a favor,'' the man said. He had been reading the book when the train he was traveling on derailed rescuers spotted him only because they saw a page of the book flutter from his hands in the dark. When a letter from his great-grandmother, suggesting a formal Indian name for him, fails to arrive from India, his father, Ashoke, impulsively settles on the name of Gogol, after the famous Russian writer whose book of short stories helped save his life many years ago in India. Gogol comes by his name through a series of random accidents and misunderstandings that will come to represent for him the unexpected trajectory of his family's life. The novel begins in Boston in 1968, with the birth of a boy named Gogol Ganguli. Lahiri's debut collection of stories, ''Interpreter of Maladies,'' which won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. It is a novel about two generations of the Ganguli family, and at the same time it is a novel about exile and its discontents, a novel that is as affecting in its Chekhovian exploration of fathers and sons, parents and children, as it is resonant in its exploration of what is acquired and lost by immigrants and their children in pursuit of the American Dream.

Jhumpa Lahiri's quietly dazzling new novel, ''The Namesake,'' is that rare thing: an intimate, closely observed family portrait that effortlessly and discreetly unfolds to disclose a capacious social vision.

Jhumpa lahiri's novel the namesake