Rating: 
Summary: Lyrical prose and vivid imagery
Review: Jhumpa Lahiri's debut novel is every bit as wonderful as her collection of short stories. Sensitively written with remarkable descriptive power, this book establishes Lahiri as one of the best young writers of our time.Through the eyes of Gogol Ganguli and his parents, we see experience almost firsthand the Indian-American immigrant experience. As a young first generation Indian immigrant myself, I can vouch for the dazzling accuracy of Lahiri's descriptions. Page after page the prose is lyrical and the word-pictures brightly vivid. There is never a dull moment nor a superficial one. A beautiful and heartfelt book- I recommend it highly.
Rating: 
Summary: good writing...fair story
Review: "The Namesake" is smooth and elegant and a quick read, but somewhat unsatisfying. Ashima, and particularly Ashoke,the parents of the title character, Gogol(later called Nikhil)are depicted stereotypically as a couple born in India that choose to come to America in the 1970's. They are not sufficiently fleshed out as individuals.
Gogol is given his unique name because his father was reading Gogol's "Overcoat" instead of sleeping, during a horrible night train crash in India, and this fact saved his life. As a form of tribute to Gogol, the author, Ashoke, waiting with his wife for a prospective name to arrive from her grandmother for their newborn son, put Gogol's name on the birth certificate The main character being a few years older than his sister, Sonia, experiences most of the frustrations and difficulties his parents have of trying to adjust to life in America and equivocates in all of his personal relationships between the life he is rebelling against and the life his parents would like him to live. He is, in effect, stymied by his Indian heritage and cannot live comfortably in either world. At the end, he tries to reconcile his dilemma as he begins to read Gogol's "Overcoat" which he found among his mother's boxes as she prepares to sell her house. We are left with the author's hope for a better life for Gogol/Nikhil. The writing is full of beautiful descriptive passages and the author persistently turns a gorgeous phrase, but the story feels pat and predictable.
Rating: 
Summary: "Namesake" is an exercise in name-dropping
Review: "The Namesake" was a marvelous short story when it appeared recently in the New Yorker. Unfortunately, it should have stayed a short story. As a novel, it simply doesn't work. The first half of the book (which contains much of the material that appeared in the New Yorker) is an interesting and intriguing meditation on the extent to which our names shape our identity. The central character is named Gogol, after the Russian writer, and he grows up to hate his name and all that it represents. As soon as he reaches adulthood, he changes it legally to Nikhil. Interestingly, the moment he changes his name he seems to lose all semblance of personality, and so does the book. From that point onwards the narrative becomes a tedious and pretentious exercise in name-dropping--of Ivy League schools, trendy New York eateries and neighborhoods, and expensive foods and wines. There is Asiago cheese and spaghetti alle vongole, Merlot and Chianti, steak rolled in bundles. The narrative meanders aimlessly, interspersed by dull affairs and stock plot devices. Two characters drop dead of sudden heart attacks, and a third of an aneurism. A woman breaks off her engagement by throwing her ring into a traffic jam, and is slapped in return. And it's a minor point, but maybe the book's copy editors were so charmed by Ms. Lahiri's prose that they failed to notice that the hero "wretches" into a tiny metal basin on page 179. I certainly did. I felt like "wretching" myself--with boredom. In her collection "Interpreter of Maladies," Jhumpa Lahiri showed tremendous promise as a short story writer. She would do well to stick to her earlier chosen metier in the future, too.
Rating:
Summary: A book to be savored
Review: If you ever thought your own life was too boring to write a book about, think again. Jhumpa Lahiri has proven that any life can be the subject of a bestselling novel, so long as ordinary events and relationships are examined with loving care and attention to the most subtle of emotions. I fell in love with every single character in The Namesake, perhaps because I could relate so much to the immigrant and 1st generation American-born experience, and because so many of Gogol's (the protagonist) perspectives and reactions resonated within me. But not every writer can pull this off -- for example, Amy Tan's books have always annoyed me because they don't do justice to the Chinese-American experience, while trying so hard to do just that. Lahiri doesn't seem to be trying at all; every sentence is so artfully yet simply constructed. Don't read this book looking for action or adventure, or waiting for some plot twist. Instead, read this book as if you were reading your own journal entries -- if only you were so lucky to have flawlessly recorded and expressed the emotions surrounding each and every exerience of your life. Some fault this book, citing that "nothing happens". How wrong are they, for in The Namesake, "life happens".
Rating:
Summary: Great story, and wonderful writing
Review: I am a huge fan of Lahiri's previous work Interpreter of Maladies and so I could not wait until this came out. I finished it in 2 days. Lahiri never disappoints with her bautiful, smooth and simple style of writing. I was a little dissapointed by some of the "rushing" that took place in some of the chapters, because of this rushing some of the characters werent developed as completely as they couldve been. Its a good story and lahiri is a master story teller, but if you want to read a work that defines her- go to interpreters.
Rating: 
Summary: Enjoyable, But Unmoving
Review: I read the Namesake for a book club amid the normal hype that a pulitzer prize winning author receives and I found myself anticipating that SOMETHING interesting would happen. It never did. I kept reading hoping something serious or dramatic would ocurr. But it didn't. Although the writing was eloquent and clear, the plot lacked the feeling and emotion that would have made me truly enjoy the book and embrace the characters. The ending of the book also seemed rushed. In short, this book is well written but unemotional and unmoving.
Rating:
Summary: I Hate This Book
Review: Honestly, I hated this book. The reviewer who said Lahiri is a short story writer who tried to stretch one (short story) into a novel is correct. Right on the money. While Lahiri's prose is cool and controlled in "The Namesake," it is also flat and the book is just plain boring, trite and so cliched. I hated every minute I spent reading it. Everything was flat, everything was so...blah. I hated this book from the first page to the last and I won't be reading Lahiri again. I think she's just a boring writer with very little to say. If any of her characters really do resemble real people, I don't want to know them. Blah.
Rating:
Summary: Truth to this story...
Review: First, if you are familiar with "Interpreter of Maladies," it is important to realize that this is a strikingly different book. While "Interpreter" focused on events in people's lives, "The Namesake" is about Gogol's life. The story jumps from one formative experience to the next, often skipping years in Gogol's life. It it the collection of these events that defines who he is. Impressively, Ms. Lahiri resists the common mistake that most writer make - she does not tell us the lesson of the story and lets us decide what Gogol has learned, what kind of man he has become, and why, in the end, he has decided to read "The Overcoat." Second, some reviewers have commented that this story does not related to the modern Indian-American experience. I beg to differ. Some of Gogol's experiences hit a little too close to home. Gogol's stories do relate to the experiences that *some* (perhaps not *all*) American born Indian-Americans and probably many (non-Indian) Americans endure as they grow up in this country. You will enjoy this book if you let the story speak for itself.
Rating: 
Summary: Not Anything Special
Review: Jhumpa Lahiri's greatest strength is her characterization, and that is evident in this, her first novel. But, Lahiri forgot to write a plot. The Namesake, in essence, is a chronicle of the failed relationships of the protagonist. There is no tension, there is no climax. Lahiri's descriptions of the quirky family Gogol Ganguli comes from are what makes the book possible to get through. Lahiri makes Nikolai Gogol an overriding theme of the novel, the main character is named after him, and his work is sporadically referenced, but no seminal assertion about Gogol is made. Just like Gogol's mother's saris, he is just part of the setting, nothing more. The writer Gogol is the namesake in the title, but the book would have been essentially the same if references to Gogol the author had been omitted. The Namesake has glimpses of greatness, and Lahiri's description and characterization paired with a gripping plot would make a great novel. But, The Namesake is not that novel. It is just long, and flat.
Rating:
Summary: Review of 'The Namesake'
Review: 'The Namesake' really lives up to it's expectations! The storytelling is wonderful as is the language. Going inside the mind of an immigrant and writing with so much empathy is what Ms. Lahiri is really good at and she has surpassed herself with this novel. I would recommend this novel to everyone, immigrant or native-born. I have this feeling that even if she writes every novel on the immigrant experience, (and I've heard that she is quite young) each one will be unique and wonderful.
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