Flamingo £15.99 pp291

Names — gifts from the past to the future — shape your life, according to Jhumpa Lahiri, a Bengali writer raised in America, whose first book of short stories was welcomed by American critics with the Pulitzer prize. The Namesake, her accomplished debut novel, revolves around the Bengali practice of giving two names, one a private, family pet name, the other a “good” name used in the external world of school and work, but never heard at home.

Lahiri has three more or less equal heroes, a mother, father and son, which is occasionally awkward in terms of changing points of view but suits her subject matter, the changing life of two generations of an Indian family that emigrates to America. The differences between Bengali and American naming practices are emblematic of all the other differences between the two countries. When a baby boy is born to the newly arrived Ashima and her husband Ashoke, they are still waiting for a letter from Ashima’s grandmother in India that will suggest the “good” or formal name for him. It never arrives, so the baby is given only a pet name — “Gogol”, after Nikolai Gogol, the Russian novelist, whose work saved Ashoke’s life when he was reading it just before a lethal train crash in India, and subsequent rescuers noticed a movement next to the book’s fluttering pages.

There is subtle humour in the way the name Gogol brings out the Americanness of the son’s adopted culture. When he starts school, the parents decide Gogol must have a “good” name, and choose Nikhil, a respectable Bengali name. However, the liberal, child-centred American primary school teacher notes that the boy does not respond to Nikhil and enters his name in the register as Gogol, writing to his parents that this is “due to their son’s preference”. “What about the parents’ preferences?” Ashoke and Ashima ask themselves, puzzled.

The name Gogol turns out to be a minefield for Americans. They are unable to understand that it is not, in any case, Bengali, and comically ask what it means “in Indian”. The boy grows to detest his name, and when his father gives him a copy of Gogol’s short stories, he does not read it. Growing up to become a cool New York architect, he adopts the name, Nikhil, that he once scorned, and his elegant American girlfriends shorten it to Nick. Only after the unexpected death of his father does Nikhil turn back towards India with an engagement to a Bengali childhood friend who, of course, knows him as Gogol.

The Overcoat, by the Russian novelist, is the work to which Lahiri points us, although she does not explain why. It is, in fact, the story of a man lazily given the name of his father, Akaky Akakyevich, and mocked by everyone. He is a minor official and his work echoes his name, for he endlessly copies the work of others. Lahiri does tell us that in Bengali families, by contrast, “individual names are sacred, inviolable”.

Good novelists, like Bengali parents, must make their creations unique, and Lahiri’s central characters are painfully believable. My only quibble is that her Americans, despite small failures of comprehension, are shining angels — honest, helpful, clean, loving and ecologically aware, which may please American readers. In this respect, Lahiri’s larger picture suffers alongside the sharp, incisive lines of another comparison of India and America, Fasting, Feasting by that great writer Anita Desai. But this is still an extremely good first novel, a glowing miniature of a tiny family making the voyage between two worlds.

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