Post B # 7

I thought that the Namesake was a pretty good book overall, but the ending was terrible. Some would say that it was just meant to be that way, but the way Lahiri ended the story was bad for the protagonist, and bad for the reader. I thought that after he met, married, and settled down with an Indian woman, the book would kind of wind down, and end happily. I know that that is cliché, but I don't care, because that is what readers like to read. The story, however, didn't wind down. Moushumi finds a letter addressed to someone named Dmitri, and it stirs old memories in her. Dmitri was Moushumi's first sexual partner, from either college or highschool. She remembers that some of the first words he said to her were, "You're going to make a lot of men cry." What angered me is that she lived up to that. When she finds Dmitri's letter, she meets him and starts having an affair.
Gogol first hears of Dmitri when they go out with Moushumi's friends, and he starts to ask himself questions. They are just harmless questions like, "Who is he," and, "Where is he now," but he does eventually find out that she is having an affair with him, and it makes him sick. "The question had sprung out of him, something he had not consciously put together in his mind until that moment. It felt almost comic to him, burning in his throat. [...] He felt the chill of her secrecy, numbing him, like a poison spreading through his veins" (282). I felt like the book was just a big hypocritical joke after I read about it. All throughout the novel, Gogol's family and relatives had been telling him, "Just make sure you marry an Indian woman." He has some affairs with American women, and then marries an Indian woman, and what does she do? Cheat on him. The ending of The Namesake was disheartening, and left Gogol feeling cold and alone.