The Namesake is in the Details

I stood at the kitchen sink, water flowing over my hands and pooling in the dirty dishes. Vague, vaguely beleagured feeling that I should be writing. Anything. But—nothing to write. No sense of direction. No idea how to fix the novel about Liza, Simon, and Robin; no idea where to take it. It doesn’t seem to have a plot. I don’t think I can write a novel without a plot. A novel about “life.” I don’t care enough about details; I don’t have an eye for them, a facility for describing them.

But what’s a facility for description? In Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake, no one detail JUMPS. But together, there’s this feeling of fullness, of life overflowing out over the page such that you can’t stop reading—you know these people, their daily lives, too well to stop reading. Though there’s no plot, exactly, just a story of an immigrant Bengali family living in Massachusetts, you always want to know: and what next? How did these people live out their lives? What did they do? What became of their son Gogol? What kind of life did he go on to live? The very best blogs take on some of that unstoppable dailiness (personal, this-is-my-life blogs, I mean, not political or issue-oriented ones). It’s the same quality present in a Tolstoy novel, in spades. The utterly ordinary becomes compulsively readable, though there are no magic devices, no amulets, no murders, no suspects, no machine driving the plot.

How do you find that story? How do you trust it (and yourself) enough to believe that it could be readable? Because breaking, or abandoning, the machines seems like too much of a leap.

And it probably is. I mean, Tolstoy, right?

Right.