A Vermeer Word Painting

There is something about the 17th Century painter JanVermeer that seems to have held an unusually strong fascination for women novelists in recent years. In1999-2000 his work was the focus of books published within the same twelve-month period by three differentwomen -- Girl with a Pearl Earring by Tracy Chevalier, Girl in Hyacinth Blue by Susan Vreeland,and Circles of Confusion by April Henry.

Having read two of the three, I really began to wonder what it was about his work that seemed so relevantto all three women. The immediate appeal of his small canvasses might seem to be his concentration on domesticscenes, or his mastery of color, light and texture -- velvet and satin you can feel, rich tapestries andcarpets, the luminescence of a stained glass window. But there is another quality that draws us into his scenes -- a sense of the inner life of his subjectswhose stories we do not know -- the half smile, the pensive look, the startled glance -- gestures that hint atcomplexities of emotion beneath his exquisitely rendered surfaces. Something akin, perhaps, to William CarlosWilliams' famous injunction to modern poets -- "no ideas but in things". 

Without the particular, the universal can't be experienced viscerally -- a point of view especiallyappropriate for our times when old archetypes and iconic images seem to have lost much of their power to touchus.

Jhumpa Lahiri's new novel, The Namesake, reminds me of a Vermeer painting. Shewrites in a quiet language that neither calls attention to itself nor invites the reader to wrestle with it, yether eye for details and precise descriptions draw us into an almost tactile experience of her settings. Farfrom being a literary virtual reality ride, or a voyeuristic zoo-train view of an exotic subculture, however,these sensory experiences, like the surface patterns of a rivulet, suggest the contours of what lies below andbehind the flow of her narrative, making our empathy for her characters more palpable.

Like Vermeer, also, she has chosen a limited canvas. Her tale is modest in proportions, the story of afirst-generation Bengali-American boy and his family and their lives in the interstices between the land andculture of their heritage and the social ecology of their life in the US.

Reports from the front lines of twenty-and-thirty-something Americans of South Asian descent indicate thatLahiri's representation is spot on in its particulars -- the family and community gatherings watching TV withother kids and "eating watered-down curry off paper plates" while parents converse loudly "inthe Bengali the children don't speak among themselves," the trips "home" to a strange country,the every-other-Saturday Bengali lessons taught in a friend's house from "hand sewn primers brought backby their teacher from Calcutta, intended for five-year-olds, printed, Gogol can't help noticing, on paper thatresembles the folded toilet paper he uses at school". All carefully chosen details that bring the readerright into the settings along with her characters.

The armature on which the story is built is the unusual name of the protagonist, Gogol -- an accidentalnaming forced on his parents by the need to put something on his birth certificate before bringing theirnewborn home from the hospital.This hurry-up attitude is bewildering to the young recently-arrived Bengalicouple who were waiting for an official "good name" to be chosen by an older relative and who wouldhave let his "pet name" -- the name used by family only -- evolve naturally in the intimacy of thehome. When his father blurts out the name Gogol in the hospital, it comes to him as a blast from a crisis in his own past -- a past that he does not share with the namesake until Gogol, who has come to loathe andabandon the name, is a senior in college. The story his father tells only seems to heighten the boy'sconfusion. She writes:

"Gogol listens, stunned, his eyes fixed on his father's profile. Though there are only inches betweenthem, for an instant his father is a stranger, a man who has kept a secret, has survived a tragedy, a manwhose past he does not fully know. A man who is vulnerable, who has suffered in an inconceivable way."

And when Gogol demands tearfully to know why he has not been told the story before, we have the followingexchange:

"It happened so long ago. I didn't want to upset you."

"It doesn't matter. You should have told me."

"Perhaps, his father concedes, glancing briefly in Gogol's direction. He removes the keys from theignition. "Come, you must be hungry. The car is getting cold."

But Gogol doesn't move. He sits there, still struggling to absorb the information, feeling awkward, oddlyashamed, at fault. "I'm sorry, Baba."

The scene concludes:

And suddenly the sound of his pet name, uttered by his father as he has been accustomed to hearing it allhis life, means something completely new, bound up with a catastrophe he has unwittingly embodied for years."Is that what you think of when you think of me?" Gogol asks him.

"Not at all," his father says eventually, one hand going to his ribs, a habitual gesture that hasbaffled Gogol until now. "You remind me of everything that followed."

As one whose own cultural adjustments had to be made in other directions -- US to Asia, Establishmentto 60's counter-culture -- I can say that although the details are quite different, the conflicts ofperception and adjustment he undergoes mirror many of my own experiences as well as those of lots of myfriends. In this way, The Namesake seems to me a decidedly American book, this being a countryalways somewhat in flux socially, culturally, generationally. 

What seemed to me particularly South Asian inher telling is less in the details, lush as they are, than in the tenderness she shows towards the individual membersof the family in their longings, in the restraint of their expressions, and in their struggles to find theirown individual spaces and identities across a double continental divide.

It is this gentle handling of Gogol and his parents that made this book such a pleasure for me to read. Yetit is in no way an overly sweet or sentimental portrayal. The family is imperfect, their problems difficult,Gogol's search for identity leading him down somewhat cold and convoluted paths at times. No easy answers areoffered, yet the ending, which is by no means pat, points towards a future in which Gogol may find a way toincorporate his family's past into his identity without losing himself in it.

CJ Gillen, who lived in north India as a child and (much later) in south India as a married woman, nowresides in Portland, Oregon, USA. This article also appears on SAWNET