Jhumpa Lahiri's first novel, THE NAMESAKE, begins with a recipe. In
her small apartment kitchen in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Ashima
Ganguli is mixing together Rice Krispies, peanuts, diced onion,
salt, lemon juice and chili peppers in "a humble approximation" of
a snack she used to buy in Calcutta.

For Ashima, who is newly married and nine months pregnant, who
misses her family and feels thoroughly alone in New England in the
late 1960s, everything in America is "a humble approximation" of
her life in India, which she left behind when she married Ashoke,
an engineering student at MIT. For Lahiri, who won a Pulitzer Prize
for her debut short story collection INTERPRETER OF MALADIES, this
revelatory detail is typical: refined, effortless and graceful, it
seems obvious only because it's so profound. The rest of the novel
follows this tack, locating small truths and ironies in mundane,
often overlooked objects like food and, as the title suggests,
names.

While mixing her snack, Ashima goes into labor and the next day her
first child is born --- it's a boy. Such a joyous occasion for
Ashima and Ashoke is nonetheless complicated by the choice of
names. Bengalis, Lahiri explains, have not one but two names --- a
pet name used by family and friends, and a good name by which he or
she is known to the world. "Pet names are a persistent remnant of
childhood, a reminder that life is not always so serious, so
formal, so complicated," she says. "Good names tend to represent
dignified and enlightened qualities" and appear on diplomas, awards
and certificates.

Following Bengali custom, the choice of names is left to Ashima's
aging grandmother, who posts a letter containing one name for a
girl and another for a boy. But the letter never arrives and
grasping for choices Ashoke chooses Gogol, a name with much greater
significance than merely that of his favorite writer.

Lahiri introduces the Gangulis in such a way that it feels
impossible not to be enticed into their world and demand to know
their journeys, hardships and fates. After confidently setting
these characters in motion, she traces their lives and the
repercussions of Gogol's name through three decades, knowingly
evoking the compromises and sacrifices they make to adjust to life
in America. Throughout the novel, her prose is consistently somber
and refined, subtle and subdued, but always pointed and revealing.
Likewise the novel's pace arcs gracefully, a model of writerly
patience.

But what makes THE NAMESAKE so enthralling and so richly readable
is the care with which Lahiri recreates the ever-changing America
where the Gangulis live. She populates her scenes and descriptions
with a multitude of well-observed specifics --- at times far more
details than necessary for verisimilitude, but never once
threatening to overwhelm the story.

More crucially, Lahiri writes about Indian and American cultures
with the same generosity of detail. She evokes the suburbia of
Gogol's adolescence through his beloved Beatles albums and the Olan
Mills school pictures as confidently as she describes his adulthood
in New York through Ikea furniture and Dean & DeLuca gift
baskets. Her descriptions of Ashima's painstaking preparations of
mincemeat croquettes are as assured as her descriptions of
spaghetti alla vongole at a dinner party.

Such a range of details may not seem overly significant, but Lahiri
uses these differences in cultures and cuisines to keep the reader
aware of the growing rift between these two worlds, of how far
Gogol has moved from his origins and of how strongly those Bengali
ties hold him in ways that he only gradually begins to
realize.

Ultimately, there is something culinary about THE NAMESAKE,
something complex, refined and robust in its blends of ingredients,
something substantial and nourishing in its interplay of ideas and
characters. This is a novel to savor, whose taste will linger in
the reader's mind long after the last course is eaten, the dishes
washed and put away, and the book placed aside on the shelf.