Right book, wrong time

One of the amazing features of literature is how it manages to intersect with your life - those unexpected concordences between the page and reality. Without meaning to, the books we choose often connect with our current events in surprising ways. Whether this is due to the mysterious workings of fate or the innate human drive to forge links between the meaningless elements of our lives remains unknown, but it happens frequently enough that I have a certain reverence for these experiences.

I bumped up against this phenomenom again yesterday as I finished Jhumpa Lahiri's The Namesake. This first novel (the followup to her excellent Pulitzer Prize-winning short story collection, Interpreter of Maladies) follows the life of young Gogol, the son of immigrant Bengali parents living in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Lahiri's prose is like what I imagine the weather in India to be - it flows over you like the barest of breezes on a day just this side of stifling, and it works wonderfully for her subject. Gogol butts up against the strictures of cultural traditions that don't connect to his everyday life as a typical American, and his struggle for balance forms the heart of the book. As he weaves through school, career, and myriad love affairs, he vacillates between the steady constancy of his parents' life and the unmoored drifting of his own.

Lying in bed finishing this book last night, with the ever-faithful wag-a-muffin at my side, Lahiri's descriptions of love and longing got to me in a way that I wasn't expecting. Science Guy is out of town this week at a conference, and her prose just ratched up the miss-you quotient by about 100 points. I doubt that I would have had such an emotional reaction to the book at any other time, but on that day it was a huge magnifier. I might have to reread this at a later date to see if my response changes.