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We first meet Ashima and Ashoke Ganguli in Calcutta, India, where they enter into an arranged marriage, just as their culture would expect. Ashoke is a professor in the United States and takes his bride to this foreign country where they try to assimilate into American life, while still maintaining their distinctly Bengali identities. When their first child is born, a son, they are awaiting a letter from Ashima’s grandmother telling them his name, which she is to have selected. In the absence of the letter, and at the insistence of the American hospital, they select what is meant to be a temporary name. The name of Ashoke’s favorite author, the Russian Gogol.

There is a great significance in Ashoke’s selection of this name for his son, but Gogol does not know this. All he knows as he grows older is that he has a name that is strange and cumbersome and unwieldy and that he wants a name that blends and reflects his world, not the world of Bengal but the world of America. His name becomes, for him, evidence of his not belonging.

Against this backdrop, Lahiri examines the immigrant experience of the Gangulis, the confusion and difficulties faced by the first generation Americans who are their children, and the delicate ties that bind the generations to each other and to the culture they have left behind. As we watch Gogol progress through his life, there is much that we understand from our own experience and much that is unique to his experience alone.

In the end, I found this book was about expectations. The expectations parents have for their children, the expectations we have for ourselves, the need to live up to a criteria we sometimes do not understand or come to understand far too late, and the loneliness of each individual, even within the confines of a loving family.

By any standard, this book would be quite an accomplishment. As a first novel, this book is amazing. I have Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies on my shelf and I am now anxious to get to it. She is destined to be an important voice in literature.