“The Namesake” is somewhat fiction with reality and the story moves around cities in India and United States and is about a family that has migrated from India to United States. Gogol Ganguly who is born in United States to Indian parents Ashima and Ashoke Ganguly struggles to be Americanized.
The name “Namesake” comes from the idea where in the US he gets compared to Nikolai Gogol (his namesake) which he hates.
Gogol grows up being influenced with the American culture and society, when he joins the Yale University he falls in love with Maxine and gets involved into her American family, after the death of his father he realizes his duties towards his family and leaves Maxine to marry a Bengali girl but later finds her to be going around with someone else so he finally leaves her and is in a free state of mind when the book ends.
The book presents a contrast of how the culture and values of a family contradict with the environment where a person grows and how there is always a struggle to match the mass.
