The Namesake

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2003

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Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-3

Chapters 4-6

Chapters 7-9

Chapters 10-12

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Quiz

Chapters 7-9Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 7 Summary

Near Christmas, Ashima spends an afternoon creating greeting cards she plans to send to family friends. She has grown somewhat used to living on her own, as Ashoke rarely visits from Ohio and only on short weekends. She has started to work part time in the local library, and she made her first American friends after 28 years in the country. Ashoke calls her to tell her he is waiting in a hospital’s emergency room because he is not feeling well. Ashima is not concerned until evening comes and Ashoke has not phoned again. When she reaches the Cleveland hospital, an intern informs her that Ashoke has died of a massive heart attack.

Sonia flies from San Francisco, where she is studying for her LSAT (Law School Admission Test) to be with Ashima, and Gogol travels to Cleveland to identify his father formally. Having arranged for cremation with the funeral home, he takes his father’s rented car and drives back to Ashoke’s rented apartment, which he proceeds to clear out of everything his father owned, as Indian customs dictate. He feels empty and tired and decides to spend the night in the apartment, despite Max’s advice to go to a hotel.

Once back in Boston, the reduced Ganguli family enters a 10-day mourning period, where they eat only one vegetarian meal at 6:30 pm. The house is full of their many Bengali friends, but they feel alone. On the 11th day, they hold a religious ceremony in Sanskrit. Gogol decides to stay at the family home, despite his earlier plans to go to New Hampshire for New Year’s, and he spends the next several weeks with his mother and sister. Finally, on his way back to New York, riding in the train, he remembers a family visit to Cape Cod and how his father took him to the end of the promontory, “a place where there was nowhere left to go” (222), telling him to always remember their moment alone together.

Chapter 8 Summary

A year after his father’s death, Gogol goes to Boston every week. He and Max have broken up because she was “jealous” of his family and the time he has started spending with them again. Sonia now lives at home, and Ashima has become thinner, her hair graying. Gogol is preparing his registration exam, and he enrolls in a revision course where he meets Bridget, a married woman with whom he has an uncomplicated sexual affair.

Ashima asks Gogol to contact a young woman he used to know as a child, Moushumi Mazoomdar, whom he remembers vaguely. At first, he resists, but then acquiesces. They meet in a bar in east Village. Moushumi (nicknamed Mo) is pursuing a PhD in French literature at NYU and teaching at a college, and Gogol finds her fascinating and beautiful. She has lived in Paris, were she met an American banker with whom she was engaged, only to break off the engagement a week before the wedding ceremony when she realized he felt only contempt for her culture and her family.

Gogol and Mo begin dating, and within three months they share each other’s spaces fully. Gogol experiences a new level of intimacy with a woman, especially as they find their common background and their need to reject it often to be a bonding thing. Mo tells Gogol how she has always avoided Bengali men because her family instructed her to marry one since she was five. She tells him of her year in Paris, where she had affairs with many men in order to erase her lonely teenage years. After meeting her fiancé, she moved back to New York, and after breaking off with him, she experienced a nervous breakdown. It took her a while to recover, and just as she found a place of her own and settled into her studies again, her mother asked her to meet up with Gogol.

Chapter 9 Summary

Gogol and Mo marry within a year, weeks after Gogol has turned 30. Their families choose a venue in New Jersey, where Mo’s parents live. The wedding ceremony is as close to a traditional Indian wedding as possible, and their mothers and relatives plan everything for them, which makes Ashima happy. Gogol and Mo know nothing of the customs, and relatives have to guide them through the ceremony; “He is aware that together he and Mo are fulfilling a collective, deep-seated desire” (265).

They use the money they have received in lieu of gifts as a deposit to buy a small but luxurious apartment in Manhattan. At times, Gogol finds remnants of Mo’s previous life with Graham (including the wedding dress she never used) and this disturbs him and provokes secret jealousy.

They spend the next March in Paris, where Mo is attending a conference. Gogol feels out of place, silenced, and unable to fit in with Mo’s European self, so he spends most of the time sightseeing on his own.

Back in New York, they spend a lot of time with many of Mo’s university friends, especially Astrid and Donald, “a languidly confident couple” (279), who own a brownstone in Brooklyn and who were originally Graham’s friends. Gogol views Mo’s friends as elitist and pretentious and finds it difficult to participate in conversations, but he realizes with dismay that Mo wishes to be like them. After seeing them, she appears dissatisfied with their own way of life.

During one dinner, the talk is about baby names, as Astrid is pregnant. Slightly drunk, Mo suddenly reveals that Gogol has changed his name, and he feels this as a betrayal, even though she is obviously not aware of the significance of the occasion. Angry, he claims that there is no such thing as a perfect name and that people should remain nameless until they can choose their own names.

Chapters 7-9 Analysis

Throughout the novel, Lahiri uses the technique of time shifts to quicken the action and further the plot. In Chapter 7, Ashima has lived in the USA for 28 years, and this is roughly the time span the novel has covered since the first chapter. In a novel of this size, this is a necessary and functional technique, as it allows the author to focus on key events in the characters’ lives and approach them analytically without slowing narration down with unnecessary details. Furthermore, this technique also highlights the events that prove to be instrumental or formative in the characters’ lives.

It has taken Ashima almost 30 years to achieve a level of comfortable assimilation into the American society, which is evidenced by her joining the local library. However, just when she has grown comfortable in her new status, Ashoke suddenly dies, which throws her again into a state of sorrow, confusion, and disarray. This moment parallels the beginning of the novel, only now Lahiri juxtaposes death and the birth from the first chapter. Ashoke’s disappearance from life and the novel is sudden and reflects his position as a character: even though he has been instrumental in getting the family settled in America, his life story comes alive only during his younger years, especially thanks to his brush with death. Once Ashoke has died, Gogol understands how much of his own life he has spent not registering his father’s presence, much as the reader will. In this way, Lahiri underscores the ebb and flow of individual lives and reminds us of the fact that some people seem always to play the supporting role in the lives of others around them. When Gogol spends the night in his father’s rented, empty apartment, he fails to connect with his father’s spirit in a way that shows that he has absented his father from his life a long time ago. This causes another shift in Gogol’s character which leads him to break off his relationship with Maxine and spend more time with his mother and sister.

Meeting Mo in Chapter 8 proves to be yet another significant step in Gogol’s journey to maturity and self-reliance (and another key juncture in the novel’s structure). Their marriage seems destined because they both share the same ambivalence toward their heritage and are able to understand one another. However, Gogol soon realizes that Mo’s coping mechanisms are more decisive and ultimately more brutal than his; her rejection of two cultures for the third, and her year of abandon in Paris are two such examples. More importantly, Mo’s fantasies do not match Gogol’s. Where his character yearns for stability of identity, hers finds comfort in adopting various complex psychological guises, which we see in the difference between the Mo Gogol knows and the one she reveals in front of her urbane friends. Symbolically, Gogol begins to realize how treacherous Mo’s fantasy life is once she breezily reveals his name change to her friends, proving she has not grasped the significance the event has had on her husband. Gogol’s reaction is to embrace the fantastic idea of children remaining nameless until they can decide on a name for themselves. This moment reveals how deeply conflicted he still is about his own name and what role it has played in his life.