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Author Jhumpa Lahiri talks about the immigrant experience, her new novel, and the betrayal of becoming American
BY CAMILLE DODERO
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It’s difficult to convey the quiet beauty of Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake (Houghton Mifflin, 2003), the long-awaited follow-up to her 2000 Pulitzer Prize–winning short-story collection Interpreter of Maladies. A novel about the son of Bengalese immigrants reared in Massachusetts, The Namesake limns the first 30 years of Gogol Ganguli’s life as he grapples with the conflict between the conservative traditions of his parents’ cultural heritage and the inevitable influence of his American environs (see "Second Helpings," Arts, September 12). Inspired by the Russian novelist, Gogol’s peculiar moniker is neither Bengalese nor American — so it serves as a tangible emblem of the clash between cultural legacy and the longing for assimilation. But the true splendor of The Namesake is that Lahiri writes in a whisper, a susurrus of sights and sounds that conjures up the intimacy of a first-person narrative through a third-person perspective. The book is graceful, affecting, and gentle — qualities that aren’t easy to express, even for Lahiri. "I don’t want to over-explain anything," she says. "I think that ideally, my work speaks for itself." Lahiri, who grew up in Rhode Island, spent nearly a decade in Boston, earning MAs in English, creative writing, and comparative literature, as well as a PhD in Renaissance Studies, from Boston University, and manning the shelves at WordsWorth in Harvard Square. She spoke to the Phoenix from New York, where she lives with her husband and young son. Q: Why did you choose Gogol as the protagonist’s name? A: It’s based in real life. I was in India once — I don’t remember exactly when, maybe 10 or 15 years ago — and I was made aware of a friend of my cousin’s named Gogol, a little boy. For some reason, that name stuck in my head. I often keep a laundry list of ideas — not even ideas for stories, but images, names, little things that inspire me. And I have no idea if those things will ever amount to anything, but I jot them down. One of the things I had jotted down years and years ago was the phrase "a boy named Gogol." Eventually, I wanted to see if that could come to anything. That’s how it started. Q: Both of your books take place in Boston. You grew up in Rhode Island and live in New York; why do you keep returning to Massachusetts? A: I don’t know. [Laughs] I did live there for a long time. Eight years. I sort of spent my 20s in Boston. Also it was the first place my family came [to] from England when they emigrated to America. They lived in Cambridge, I lived in Cambridge for a year, I don’t remember that of course.... The suburban-Massachusetts landscape is very familiar to me — but it’s not my own, it’s not Rhode Island. It’s sort of a nice combination for me as a writer: something I feel very close to, but also distanced from. Q: Did you revisit any of the places you wrote about — Central Square, Cambridge Common, or MIT — when you were writing? Or were you writing from memory? A: No, I really did spend a lot of time there.... It’s part of my internal landscape and always will be. I lived there for almost a third of my life. Q: There’s a childbirth scene at the beginning of the book that you wrote before you delivered your son. Did you revisit it after you gave birth? A: I revisited it just to see. But by the time I had my son, I was working on other parts of the book, and I felt like that scene was done. I liked that I’d written it before I’d gone through it myself. I sort of wanted to have it be a product of my imagination and research — and have it stand on that, rather than drawn from my own experiences. Q: Infidelity is a recurring theme in Interpreter of Maladies and The Namesake. What draws you to it? A: Writers are always drawn to terrible things. I don’t know if it’s conscious, but I think the theme of betrayal, even when it’s not a romantic betrayal, has always been something I’ve been very aware of in my life. I think that’s for two reasons. One, my parents definitely feel — and have felt — a sense of betrayal in living here and turning their backs on their families, their parents, their siblings, their lives, their pasts. There’s a sense in which they’ve had to betray all that to make a new life. Then, I also think that a lot of the tension I felt as a child of immigrants also had to do with issues of [betrayal]. Like, are you going to be faithful to your parents’ culture? Or turn your back and sort of become American? And that tension always felt like a betrayal — to be more American, to do it in another way, to choose things that my parents would not have chosen for me. And I think that’s maybe why I dwell on it in my work.... But for the most part, I’m not thinking about that, about the big picture, when I’m writing. Q: Is the immigrant experience something you will continue to explore in your work? A: Probably on some level, but I don’t think on a such an explicit level as in this book. I dealt with it in Interpreter — sometimes more, sometimes less, depending on the story. And in The Namesake, that was what the book was about. I anticipate in future works that those issues will be in the air, but they’ll probably be more peripheral than central. Q: You said earlier that you’re not thinking about the "big picture" when you write. What are you thinking about? A: I’m thinking about making sense, making one sentence cohere and logically progress from the previous sentence to the next sentence. That’s what I’m thinking about when I’m writing. Eventually, I’m thinking about things like making it sound decent and real. And that’s already an overwhelming task for me. And I generally think less about the thematic issues — I’m really trying to focus on characters and situation, apart from the technical level. Which is also very daunting. Q: What’s the most difficult aspect of the writing process for you? A: How much time do you have? It’s really all incredibly hard for me. I think getting something off the ground is excruciating, making it sing is excruciating. It’s all really hard for me; it’s really a separate challenge at each turn. For me, it requires so much perseverance and patience, and I’m sure a certain amount of stubbornness too, to stick with it. But I think whenever you feel something is not working, that you’re not satisfied with, the hardest part [of writing] is that feeling. And then when I’m done with it, I don’t feel any sort of exhilaration. Then the doubt comes: "Is this okay? Is this any good?" I’m not into this because it’s fun. There are other ways in which I enjoy myself in life. Q: Novelists often seem to talk about the writing process like it’s a form of self-torture. A: It’s a huge, isolating, demanding struggle. And there’s nowhere to stand for so much of it. You’re lost and you’re in the dark, and it’s terrifying. I’ve never climbed a mountain or anything like that, but it sounds, from what I’ve read, incredible, arduous, and dangerous. Yet there’s something pushing those people up those mountains. They’re inspired to take on that struggle for some reason. And that’s the way it works with most writers I know. But they’re just bound and determined to accept that struggle in their lives and to grow as a person and as a writer. Q: So why do you write? A: Because I feel awful if I don’t. That’s really the answer. That’s how I feel most connected to life, in some way. It’s a vital part of my life and my soul, the way I understand life and how I live, it’s so deeply bound up with that, I can’t imagine not doing it. It’s not something that I feel I can decide not to do.... It’s like asking me why [do you] love your son. It’s like a given inextricable part of who I am and how I live. Q: Who is your ideal reader? A: In the beginning, I don’t imagine anybody but me. Like right now, I’m starting new stuff, so I don’t think about a reader at all — it’s just a very private kind of meditation.... At the very tail end of a project — when it’s pretty much complete and I’m trying to sort of conclude it and polish it as best as I can — at that point, I imagine a very small group of people that I know, maybe people who’ve read my work. Like I imagine my writing teacher from BU. Occasionally, I try to imagine a writer I really admire. But that’s always very intimidating. Q: What do you think is the job of the novelist? A: You have to work as hard as you can and be true to yourself. You have to listen to your heart and your mind and give yourself over to whatever it is you can produce. That means if it’s only short stories, it’s only short stories. If it’s only novels, it’s only novels. If it’s one novel every 15 years, it’s one novel every 15 years. You have to sort of allow what will happen — it’s not about being passive exactly, because writing is an act. You have to do it, otherwise it doesn’t get done. But there’s also a sense of — I don’t know. Q: Do you mean being open to your subconscious? A: Being open, being brave, of not being afraid of writing this or that because of whatever reason. Not being affected by what people say or think or whether they’re going to like you or not like you. And as hard as it is to not be affected by whether this is going to make you a living or not make you a living, it’s not about that. Q: Should writing be a profession? Or just an avocation? A: I certainly miss certain aspects of when it wasn’t my job. If you want some sort of legitimacy and you want some validation — by validation, I don’t mean that I had to be a published author, but that the small group of people I imagine as my audience like my work and think I have something to say. That sort of validation was important to me.... I think what I miss most is that [before] I was left on my own. There wasn’t as much interest or scrutiny. In a way, [attention] is just a double-edged sword. You long for it, but it’s also a strange presence when it comes. Jhumpa Lahiri reads at the First Parish Church, in Cambridge, on September 16, at 7 p.m. The event is sponsored by WordsWorth Books. Call (617) 566-6660. Camille Dodero can be reached at cdodero[a]phx.com
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