'Maladies' author finds success a bit disquieting

By Teresa Wiltz
Washington Post

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jhumpa Lahiri has released her first novel, "The Namesake." Associated Press

And then there is this other place, a quieter place, the place where she is really most comfortable. Home.

Toys are scattered about, a shirt lies forgotten on the bathroom floor — testimony to lives given over completely to the care and feeding of the very, very young. The teakettle is humming on the stove in the galley, where her husband, Alberto, a man lean of face and frame, is futzing about, making lunch for the baby.

Throughout their Park Slope co-op in Brooklyn, there are talismans of love: photos of weddings and other gatherings, of friends and first birthdays, abstract art painted by her mother-in-law, shelves crammed tight with much-read tomes.

She sits in the living room, snuggling with the big-eyed moppet on her lap, tired and more than a little jet-lagged, cooing in Bengali as ferocious masks from Guatemala and Mexico gaze down on them.

This is but a momentary respite in the latest crush of publicity.

Her first novel, "The Namesake," is the much-anticipated follow-up to "Interpreter of Maladies," her debut collection of short stories, which won her the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2000 and a whole lot of attention and praise that she's still not quite sure what to do with.

Indeed, winning the Pulitzer was discomfiting, in that the 36-year-old has yet to figure out why. It came suddenly, a short hard blast of good fortune, shoving her into the literary spotlight and onto the best-seller lists, all thanks to a prize for which she wasn't even aware she was a contender.

Did she deem herself unworthy?

She hesitates before answering, parsing her remarks with the precision of a woman for whom words matter much.

"I thought Pulitzers were given to authors who were ensconced in their work," she says. "I didn't understand how I could arrive at that, having written just nine stories. But I had to accept that and accept it graciously.

"I don't think it's wise for a writer to question why a book is praised or dismissed. It's just my job to write the books."

It is the process that entrances.

"I've always never loved anything more than sitting quietly in a room by myself, imagining things," she says.

Indeed, it grounded her. Even as a little girl, growing up in a university town in Rhode Island, the daughter of Bengali Indian immigrants, Lahiri entertained herself with the stories she wrote. Writing was play, something carried on as she made her way through Barnard College and Boston University, where she received master's degrees in English, creative writing and comparative studies in literature and the arts, and a doctorate in Renaissance studies.

Writing also was an escape. Growing up brown and "foreign" in a town where white was the predominant theme had its challenges. There was the persistent feeling of other, not American enough, not Indian enough, of constantly straddling fences, stretching identities.

She is amused and slightly annoyed by Indians who immigrate to the United States and eagerly embrace a Caucasian identity, excitedly reporting to their Indian friends that they'd moved into an all-white neighborhood, where there were no blacks. Thanks to her parents — her mother would often retort to such friends, "What do you think you are?" — she said, "I was never into any sort of denial."

From "The Namesake":

For being a foreigner, Ashima is beginning to realize, is a sort of lifelong pregnancy — a perpetual wait, a constant burden, a continuous feeling out of sorts. It is an ongoing responsibility, a parenthesis in what had once been ordinary life, only to discover that that previous life has vanished, replaced by something more complicated and demanding. Like pregnancy, being a foreigner, Ashima believes, is something that elicits the same curiosity from strangers, the same combination of pity and respect.

Lahiri knew who she was: Indian American. London-born Deshi. And yet, the American part was hard to claim. "I really felt it would be a betrayal of my parents to call myself American," she says. But on visits to India, she was the American.

It is the complications of being a hyphenated American that informs her work, the same challenges that face Gogol, the American-born protagonist in "The Namesake":

Teleologically speaking, ABCDs are unable to answer the question, 'Where are you from?' " the sociologist on the panel declares. Gogol has never heard the term ABCD. He eventually gathers that it stands for "American-born confused deshi." In other words, him. He learns that the C could also stand for "conflicted." He knows that deshi, a generic word for "countryman," means "Indian," knows that his parents and all their friends always refer to India simply as desh. But Gogol never thinks of India as desh. He thinks of it as Americans do, as India.

"The Namesake" is told from several points of view: Those of Ashima, the Bengali bride who weds Ashoke in an arranged marriage and moves with him to Cambridge, Mass.; Ashoke, the M.I.T. professor who years earlier escaped a disastrous train wreck and decides to christen his son after the Russian writer Nikolai Gogol in honor of his own survival; the British-born and American-raised Moushima, sleek and sophisticated, fluent in French and more than a little flattered when she is mistaken for anything other than Indian.

Although these other voices compel, the story is ultimately a coming-of-age tale about Gogol, "the namesake," a confused and ambivalent young architect who spends much of his time running from all things Indian. First of all, he hates his name, which was meant to be a family name, a pet name, nothing more. But it sticks when his great-grandmother's letter, the airmail letter announcing his "good name," is lost in the mail and U.S. bureaucrats demand that a name, any name, be put on his birth certificate.

But Gogol doesn't understand its significance, and as soon as he graduates from high school, he changes his name to Nikhil.

But now that he's Nikhil, it's easier to ignore his parents, to tune out their concerns and pleas. ... It is as Nikhil, that first semester, that he grows a goatee, starts smoking Camel Lights at parties and ... discovers Brian Eno and Elvis Costello and Charlie Parker. ... It is as Nikhil that he loses his virginity at a party at Ezra Stiles, with a girl wearing a plaid woolen skirt and combat boots and mustard tights.

Naming is everything, a way to claim identity, to pass on notions of love, tradition and hope. And so it is, perhaps, that Lahiri dedicates her book to the two men in her life, her husband and son, "For Alberto and Octavio, whom I call by other names."

For Octavio, she knows, life as a second-generation American-born Guatemalan Greek Deshi will be very different, a different kind of navigating between cultures, but navigating nonetheless.