The Children of 1965: Allegory, Postmodernism, and Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake

Abstract

Jhumpa Lahiri was already a celebrated author when her first novel appeared in print. Her short story of Maladies was selected for O. Henry Prize and for inclusion in Best American Short Stories. Her book of collected stories, Interpreter of Maladies, won Pulitzer Prize in literature. And in following year, The New Yorker named her one of 20 most important young American writers of new century. It is not surprising, therefore, that The Namesake attracted widespread press coverage. Reviewers foregrounded novel's mastery of form, focused on specific moments in text when author's skills were clearly in evidence, and compared her favorably to other contemporary authors who seemed, in contrast, overly self-indulgent (Kakutani, Kipen, Metcalf, Caldwell). If reviewers were in agreement about Lahiri's abilities as a writer, however, their enthusiasm about originality of her storytelling was more muted. David Kipen observed: Theme-wise, The Namesake marks no special advance over Interpreter of Maladies. It's a novel about an immigrant family's imperfect assimilation into America.... A certain sameness begins to creep in midway through book--explicable, if not completely excusable, as its picaresque hero's compulsion to trace same neurotic patterns over and over. In many ways, ordinary nature of The Namesake's narrative distances it from other novels, which tend, as Mark McGurl has recently argued, to combine the routine operations of modernist autopoetics with a rhetorical performance of cultural group membership preeminently, though by no means exclusively, marked as ethnic (117). By autopoetics, McGurl refers to reflexivity found in experimentation of highly esteemed contemporary fiction; this reflexivity is not so much a radical break from modernism as it is continuing interest of literary forms as objects of a certain kind of professional research (111). The combination, then, of an intense focus on form with a preoccupation with leads to a cultural (117)--a phrase that describes an impressive array of authors from Jews like Philip Roth and Saul Bellow to Native Americans like N. Scott Momaday, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Louise Erdrich; Asian Americans like Maxine Hong Kingston and Chang-rae Lee; Chicanas like Sandra Cisneros; and African Americans like Ralph Ellison, Ishmael Reed, and Toni Morrison. More impressive still, authors who don't have same claim to as these do nevertheless organize their work as if they were writing novels, minoritizing lower middle class (Raymond Carver), Vietnam War veterans (Tim O'Brien), Southern culture (Flannery O'Conner), and even white techno-nerds (Neal Stephenson). Far from thinking of postmodern fiction and novel as dividing literary field (120), a focus on high cultural pluralism suggests that postmodern is intimately related to what late Arthur Schlesinger Jr. famously denounced as a cult of ethnicity (41). (1) If so, what are we to make of a novel like The Namesake, which clearly combines an intense awareness of its own form (which reviewers quickly picked up in their celebration of author's craft) with a definite marking, but does so without experimentation--nor angst such experimentation routinely gives expression to--that we have come to recognize as indicative of serious postwar American fiction? In response to this question, I wish to suggest that a generational shift in perspective has taken place. The cultural landscape that confronted an earlier cohort of pioneering high cultural postwar novelists required hard work to make imaginable phenomena we have come to group under capacious and aging sign of postmodernism; these are phenomena like accelerated time/space compression of late capitalism, feverish self-fashioning of individuality that is wholly consonant with consumerism such capitalism relies on, hypermobility of populations within and across borders of various kinds, and dominance of biopolitics and its intertwining with geopolitics. …