The search for identity

Jhumpa Lahiri is tired. Overwhelmed, talked out, with a brain that is, as she apologetically puts it, “fried.” Two weeks into promoting her first novel “The Namesake,” the 35-year-old author is in that peculiar Twilight Zone known as the national book tour, a whirlwind of readings, interviews, airplanes and takeout food.

Although she’s brought her husband and their 16-month-old son on the road with her, she’s not getting much time to see them. This day alone, she’s flown to Los Angeles from the Bay Area, checked into her Beverly Hills hotel room, gone downtown for an on-air radio interview, then returned to the hotel in the late afternoon.

Now, curled into an armchair in a fifth-floor reception area, she checks her watch periodically like a nervous student waiting for the start of an exam. In an hour, she’ll be on her way back downtown to do a reading at the Central Library, after which she’ll finally get a little downtime or, more likely, some much-needed sleep.

“To me,” Lahiri says, “this all seems surreal, out of proportion. There’s a strange sense these days that you have to have a great book, a big book, right from the outset. But when I think about the writers I admire, their greatest work often came many books down the line. So I’m wary, even though I’m a recipient of all this attention. I don’t want to seem ungrateful, but I don’t really understand it. I don’t relate to it, frankly. I am very much a young writer. I only have two books.”

What Lahiri’s talking about is the conundrum of contemporary media culture, the way writers and other artists can become -- for a moment, anyway -- celebrities, in a manner that has little to do with their work. For her, this is an unanticipated legacy of her first book, “Interpreter of Maladies,” an exquisitely rendered collection of nine stories that came out in 1999.

“Interpreter of Maladies” traces the experiences of Bengali immigrants in the greater Boston area (Cambridge, mostly), exploring the question of culture clash by framing it as an expression of daily life. The characters here are caught in their own kind of Twilight Zone, halfway between the traditional Indian society they come from and the eclectic Americanness to which they aspire.

Published as a paperback original, with virtually no advance publicity, the book became a word-of-mouth phenomenon, and went on to win a Pulitzer Prize in 2000. Three years later, Lahiri still is dealing with the fallout, which emerges not only in the full-court press with which her publisher, Houghton Mifflin, is promoting “The Namesake,” but also in the expectations of her readership.

“At one of the readings for this book,” she recalls, “someone asked me, ‘Why did you decide to write a novel? Is it because you’re an expert at the short story?’ I’m not an expert at the short story. I wrote nine stories that are in one book I wrote when I was in my late 20s and early 30s. The experience I have on a day-to-day basis is one of still learning, of still having miles to go. Get back to me in 45 years.”

Lahiri’s learning process is very much evident in “The Namesake,” which, in many ways, picks up where “Interpreter of Maladies” left off. The story of Gogol Ganguli, a Boston-born Bengali who cannot quite navigate the complex crosscurrents of his identity, the book unfolds slowly, at an almost stately pace, beginning a few weeks before the birth of its protagonist and following him for the next 30 years.

As with Lahiri’s short fiction, the focus here is on small, domestic dramas -- first love, the death of a parent, the heartbreaking miscommunication between a father and a son. “It really stems from what I like to read,” Lahiri explains. “I admire Chekhov and Joyce and William Trevor, who write about the behind-closed-doors side of life. When I think about writing, those are the moments that haunt me, and when I think about characters, that’s how I accompany them. What is it like to stand and wait for the elevator to open? What is the person thinking about?”

Twists and turns

This is a short story writer’s aesthetic, although, Lahiri notes, there’s a certain overlap with the novel, as well. “It’s basically the same,” she says of the relationship between long and short fiction. “And equally difficult. It’s writing sentences you can tolerate, and creating lives out of thin air. But I felt poised to write a novel because my stories were getting longer and I wasn’t really seeing them as stories anymore. For me, a story is about a singular event. One thing happens, and there’s a turn. Whereas in a novel, there are twists and turns and twists and turns. And as I wrote more stories, I realized they were taking more twists and turns.”

It’s interesting to hear Lahiri discuss the similarities between novels and short stories, for “The Namesake” is a book with roots in both. That’s not just a function of Lahiri’s status as a story writer, but also of the central role played here by 19th century Russian writer Nikolai Gogol, her protagonist’s namesake and a touchstone for his father, Ashoke.

Gogol is Ashoke’s favorite author, a writer on whom he bestows a mythic stature after a deadly train crash in which Ashoke, who has been reading Gogol, is the only survivor in his car.

“He does not thank God,” Lahiri writes, “he openly reveres Marx and quietly refuses religion. But there is one more dead soul he has to thank. He cannot thank the book; the book has perished, as he nearly did, in scattered pieces, in the earliest hours of an October day, in a field 209 kilometers from Calcutta. Instead of thanking God, he thanks Gogol, the Russian writer who had saved his life.”

The power of names

Because of Ashoke’s experience, his son’s name becomes a matter of remembrance, a way to bind the boy close. Like most children, though, Gogol bridles under his father’s expectations, preferring to make his own way.

One of the most wrenching sequences in “The Namesake” begins on Gogol’s 14th birthday, when his father gives him a collection of his namesake’s stories, which he sets aside unread. Only after Ashoke’s death does Gogol discover the volume and begin to read it, a slender thread of connection from the Russian writer through his father back to him.

“I knew,” Lahiri says, “that Gogol would end up washed up on the shores of his home, his childhood home, and that he would find a book, and that it would somehow save him and be too late to save him. I knew the book would be a link to his father, and that part of the scene would be about losing a parent and understanding a parent at the same time. Books don’t necessarily save us, but they do take us out of ourselves. And that is magical and rewarding.”

The other thread of connection that emerges throughout “The Namesake” has to do with the power of names, of identity, of how we come to recognize ourselves. Given the novel’s title, this is hardly unexpected, but for Lahiri, there’s a more fundamental issue at work. In Bengali culture, people commonly have two names -- a formal one for the outside world, and a pet name for family and friends. This, too, is something with which her protagonist must wrestle, as he tries to determine who he is.

For him, the pet name Gogol comes with all sorts of associations, chief among them the disquieting realization “that no one he knows in the world, in Russia or India or America or anywhere, shares his name.” On the other hand, his formal name, Nikhil, sets him apart in a different manner, both as a marker of his heritage and a tool of assimilation once he shortens it to Nick.

“I think,” Lahiri says, “a name can be both a way in and a way out. I think it’s the same thing. Because the [formal] name is your school name, the people who use it are Americans. So it becomes your American side.” This, in turn, offers a vivid metaphor for immigrant life, where one exists simultaneously as part of two cultures at once. “My mother,” Lahiri explains, “likens her life to train tracks, two parallel lines that never meet. She feels this in a geographical sense, because there is the world of Calcutta and everyone she loves, and then there is the world of America and her family and friends. “For my generation, though, the division is more internal. Because I’m American, it’s less obvious in a lot of ways. I don’t have an accent, so it’s hard to explain what’s behind this, whereas for my parents, it’s more obvious. People ask them where they’re from. For the next generation, it’s more blurry. And it does vary, how much you are one thing or the other. It’s never 50-50. It changes all the time.”

The same, to some extent, could be said of writing, which is nothing if not another inside/outside way of life. As an author, Lahiri is both observer and participant, the most private -- isolated even -- of practitioners and an uneasy public figure, at least for the duration of her tour. It’s an oddly bifurcated existence, and as the afternoon progresses, Lahiri’s attention turns to what she will do when this is over, when her time is again her own.

More short stories

Lately, she’s been working on some new short stories, a form to which she’s returned both because she knew this year would be difficult, and because she missed the tighter point of view. “It’s hard,” she admits, “to go back to writing stories after having written a novel. But I really hope I can continue to do both. I love reading both; I think each is satisfying in its own way.”

This brings her back to the idea of perception, to the way our achievements can sometimes box us in. “The truth,” she says, “is that I didn’t feel ready to win the Pulitzer. I still don’t. I feel like I’m at the bottom of a very tall mountain, and I have a long way to go. I’m extraordinarily humbled by all this, but one of the hardest things to deal with is how I’m regarded because of the Pulitzer. It doesn’t correspond to my reality, what gets me out of bed in the morning. And I hope it never does. I hope I won’t be afraid to stumble a few times and learn.”