It's eye-opening to read a bit about Jhumpa Lahiri's life (you pronounce her first name with the "u" sounding more like the one in "June" than in "jump"). Just like her characters in The Namesake, she is a creature of the East Coast. Although born in London, she was raised in Rhode Island, graduated from Barnard undergrad and then Boston University with multiple advanced degrees. She has taught creative writing at BU, the Rhode Island School of Design, and the New School, and lives in New York City.

Like Ashima and Ashoke, Lahiri's parents were Bengali immigrants from Calcutta and tried to raise her to observe Indian traditions while surrounded by American culture. Like Gogol and his sister, Lahiri returned to Calcutta many times to visit her extended family. She and her husband even had a traditional Bengali marriage ceremony, albeit in Calcutta, not New Jersey (and in Singhi Palace, not the Doubletree Suites).

There are plenty of angles we can take to analyze The Namesake, but let's start with the whole question of the immigrant experience, how it affects the older and younger generations in a family, the wish to assimilate--or not to--and to what degree. Whatever I say will be colored by absolutely no firsthand experience, since no ancestors of mine that I personally knew were first-generation immigrants. So I'd rather hear from the rest of you on this. If you are from India, or your parents are, how good a job did Lahiri do in depicting the tensions surrounding life in this country? Maybe you're not from India, but yet a third country, or you have parents or grandparents from elsewhere. Does the Ganguli family's experience resemble the one you are familiar with?