Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake

I spent the day trying to get over my cold but had time to finish reading The Namesake. I had enjoyed Interpreter of Maladies and so I’d been waiting for this book with great expectation. But The Namesake disappointed me. The book is exceedingly well-written and the characters carefully drawn and very engaging. Still, I found that the numerous descriptions sometimes substituted for plot and that certain writerly tics (lists, for example) became obvious in this longer work, whereas they weren’t in the short stories. Next up is The Margaret-Ghost by Barbara Novak.