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A review by floodfish
同名人 by Jhumpa Lahiri
4.0
I really like Lahiri's writing style, simultaneously digressive and efficient, striking a good balance between interior and exterior lives. I'd read the short story version of this in the New Yorker many years ago and liked it. Finally got around to the novel. (Looking back at the short story now, I'm amazed how much is in it!)
For me, there's a lot relatable geography in the story. And while I don't particularly identify with any of these characters, I feel I've known people like all of them.
The book is better the more it jumps around in time. There's tremendous narrative power in the precise but isolated views we get into the characters' lives. The weakest section is when we get a whole lot of late-1990s all at once. (Though, reading this 20 years after that time period, it is a compelling document of a certain social class in the moment just before the internet and cell phones changed everything, with Gen Xers like Gogol as the last generation to navigate early adulthood without that stuff.)
Aside from that flabby start to the fourth quarter, some other quibbles: Lahiri's careful reckoning of details leaves a lot of opportunities to poke holes and question things, but I guess I am mostly OK accepting this as the version of what she and her characters think is important.
Then there’s a (to me) bizarre lack of social awareness (around almost everything: race, class, gender, sexuality) as if Lahiri wrote this in the tradition of late-20th-century white male literary fiction. Which perhaps she did.
For me, there's a lot relatable geography in the story. And while I don't particularly identify with any of these characters, I feel I've known people like all of them.
The book is better the more it jumps around in time. There's tremendous narrative power in the precise but isolated views we get into the characters' lives. The weakest section is when we get a whole lot of late-1990s all at once. (Though, reading this 20 years after that time period, it is a compelling document of a certain social class in the moment just before the internet and cell phones changed everything, with Gen Xers like Gogol as the last generation to navigate early adulthood without that stuff.)
Aside from that flabby start to the fourth quarter, some other quibbles: Lahiri's careful reckoning of details leaves a lot of opportunities to poke holes and question things, but I guess I am mostly OK accepting this as the version of what she and her characters think is important.
Then there’s a (to me) bizarre lack of social awareness (around almost everything: race, class, gender, sexuality) as if Lahiri wrote this in the tradition of late-20th-century white male literary fiction. Which perhaps she did.