Second helpings Jhumpa Lahiri returns with a novel BY JULIA HANNA
	The Namesake By Jhumpa Lahiri. Houghton Mifflin, 302 pages, $24.

Publishing a short-story collection in today’s market is no mean feat; those companies still bold enough to bet on one certainly don’t expect the bestseller sales that Jhumpa Lahiri achieved with Interpreter of Maladies, which won the Pen/Hemingway Award and the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for its young (Lahiri was 32 at the time), strikingly attractive author (see Camille Dodero’s interview with Lahiri in the News & Features section). The near-necessity of following such a debut with a novel is another uncomfortable reality of publishing that can create overwhelming expectations for writers and their readers. Ethan Canin’s Emperor of the Air was a tough act to follow, and reviewers were not kind to Blue River. Lahiri’s new novel will confront a similar level of scrutiny, even as its author enjoys the luxury of a built-in audience and extensive media coverage.

The Namesake continues her investigation of what it means to be foreign through the experience of Gogol Ganguli, the son of Indian immigrants. It opens right before his birth, as Ashima, Gogol’s mother, mixes up an approximation of a common Calcutta snack food in her Cambridge apartment: "Tasting from a cupped palm, she frowns; as usual, there’s something missing." Food is just one of the aspects Lahiri considers in exploring the discomfort of not-quite-belonging that her characters confront; as a teenager, Gogol, eager to fit in, demands that his mother make an "American meal" of Hamburger Helper or Shake-n-Bake chicken at least once a week.

Gogol’s first-generation confusion is further complicated by the fundamental puzzle of his name. In Bengali practice, the "pet" name is used within the family, the "good" name in the outside world. When a letter from his great-grandmother bearing his good name is lost in transit, Gogol’s father chooses that of the Russian writer who saved his life as a young man: as he was tangled in the wreck of a train crash, a fluttering page from Nikolai Gogol’s "The Overcoat" caught the attention of rescuers. For years, however, Gogol is unaware of his name’s significance; its oddity is only another obstacle to achieving a comfortable level of assimilation.

No obvious plot line drives The Namesake; its movement is managed through matter-of-fact leaps in time that cover a dozen years in straightforward summary. The book also advances through the women who serve as signposts along the road of Gogol’s search for identity. At a party he meets Maxine Ratliff, an old-money New Yorker, and when he falls for her, we know it’s more than her blond hair and green eyes — it’s the family’s easy way of inhabiting the world, so different from the awkwardness of his parents, that attracts him. At the Ratliffs’ summer home, the contrast is even clearer: "The family seems to possess every piece of the landscape, not only the house itself but every tree and blade of grass. Nothing is locked, not the main house, or the cabin that he and Maxine sleep in. Anyone could walk in. He thinks of the alarm system now installed in his parents’ house, wonders why they cannot relax about their physical surroundings in the same way."

Eventually, the differences that drew Gogol in drive him away from Maxine and into the arms of Moushumi, a friend of the family. Each has been disappointed in love with partners from the "outside" world, and they discover a certain transgressive pleasure in marrying someone like each other; at one point, a waiter confuses them for brother and sister. "They talk about how they are both routinely assumed to be Greek, Egyptian, Mexican — even in this misrendering they are joined." And though there’s no happily-ever-after resolution to be found in these similarities, Gogol learns that his clumsy attempts to create a coherent identity for himself are what, in the end, define him: "Things that should never have happened, that seemed out of place and wrong, these were what prevailed, what endured, in the end."

So how does The Namesake measure up on the unfair second-book scale? Well enough, though certain tics, such as Lahiri’s extensive use of descriptive detail, become more decorative than effective, and the cool intellectual distance from which the narrative views Gogol sometimes poses a barrier to feeling the pain of his quandary. These quibbles aside, The Namesake serves up heartfelt moments of clarity. No longer pregnant with Gogol, Ashima realizes she’ll always carry the weight of her difference: "For being a foreigner . . . is a sort of lifelong pregnancy — a perpetual wait, a constant burden, a continuous feeling out of sorts. . . . something that elicits the same curiosity from strangers, the same combination of pity and respect."

Jhumpa Lahiri reads this Tuesday, September 16, at 7 p.m. at the First Unitarian Church, 3 Church Street in Harvard Square; call (617) 354-5201.