empathy from the reader. Na’s second novel, WAIT
FOR ME (2006), signals the author’s bold departure
from other Korean-American young adult lit-
erature; in it, Na explores issues of interracial ro-
mance, family, religion, and sibling rivalry in ways
that resist the conventional definitions of what it
means to grow up a Korean American in contem-
porary America.
Bibliography
Choi, Yearn Hong, and Haeng-Ja Kim, eds. Surfacing
Sadness: A Centennial of Korean-American Litera-
ture 1903–2003. Paramus, N.J.: Homa and Sekey
Books, 2003.
Na, An. “Interview with Young Adult Author An
Na,” by Cynthia Leitich Smith. Available online.
URL: http://www.cynthialeitichsmith.com/lit-re-
sources/authors/interviews/AnNa.html. Accessed
on October 9, 2006.
Tina Powell
Namesake, The Jhumpa Lahiri (2003)
JHUMPA LAHIRI’s first novel following her 2000
Pulitzer Prize–winning short story collection, IN-
TERPRETER OF MALADIES (1999), charts the “string
of accidents” that have determined the course of
Gogol Ganguli’s young life, “things for which it
was impossible to prepare but which one spent a
lifetime looking back at, trying to accept, inter-
pret, comprehend” (286–287). The Namesake is a
story of one family’s desire to belong and to find
the means by which to cope with the alienation of
exile and the challenge of renegotiating personal
and cultural identity in a foreign country.
Named for his Bengali father’s favorite Russian
author, Nikolai Gogol, Gogol is a first generation
Bengali American growing up in a Boston sub-
urb, caught between the oppressive expectations
and traditions of his immigrant parents’ extended
Bengali community, and the seductive appeal
of American pop culture, to which he and his
younger sister, Sonia, are increasingly drawn. It is
Gogol’s fate, it seems, to feel like a perennial out-
sider, never fully belonging to or embracing one
cultural identity.
As Gogol matures, he leaves the Ganguli house-
hold to study architecture at a university, even-
tually residing in New York, making a conscious
decision to live and work at a distance from his
childhood home and his cultural heritage. In order
to dissociate himself from his past and reinvent
himself, he changes his name to Nikhil, much to
the particular dismay of his father for whom the
name Gogol holds great significance, owing to his
narrow survival of a train accident in West Bengal
in his youth and the miraculous role a few pages
torn from his beloved volume of Nikolai Gogol’s
short stories played in saving his life. Gogol’s rejec-
tion of his name is also a dismissal of his father’s
traumatic history and the burdens of their com-
plex father-son relationship.
After unfulfilling relationships with American
girlfriends, the untimely death of his father, and a
failed marriage to a fellow Bengali American who
is equally ambivalent about her Indian identity,
Gogol finds himself at the age of 32 at a turning
point, reflecting on the lives of his parents, their
sorrows and sacrifices, and poignantly realizing
that, despite their shortcomings and idiosyn-
crasies, his parents valiantly fashioned a life in a
foreign country for their family with a strength
and optimism he fears he does not possess him-
self. Gogol considers with renewed appreciation
the events that have shaped him and mourns for
the things he has lost, observing regretfully that
“[w]ithout people in the world to call him Gogol,
no matter how long he himself lives, Gogol Gan-
guli will, once and for all, vanish from the lips of
loved ones, and so, cease to exist” (289).
Lahiri’s novel concludes on a somber but hope-
ful note with Gogol taking up a salvaged volume
of Nikolai Gogol’s short stories given to him years
earlier by his father. He begins to read the first
story, “The Overcoat,” and in so doing embarks on
a journey to retrieve memories of his past, his fa-
ther, and ultimately himself.Bibliography
Lahiri, Jhumpa. The Namesake. Boston: Houghton
Mifflin, 2003.Dana Hansen208 Namesake, The