The Namesake: Chapter 6 Summary & Analysis

It is 1994, and Gogol lives in New York now, having just graduated from the architecture program at Columbia. He works for a successful architecture firm and lives in a small studio in Morningside Heights, the first apartment he has ever had to himself. His parents are distressed by his small paycheck, and they occasionally send him money in the mail. They had hoped he would go to M.I.T., but he didn’t want to go back to Massachusetts and be in their world. Gogol had visited New York while at Yale, and once with his parents to visit Bengali friends in Queens, although they did not visit any landmarks at the time.

One night a draftsman from his firm, Evan, invites Gogol to a party. Gogol assumes it will be a large, anonymous affair, but when they arrive, only a few people are left in the Tribeca loft. Gogol meets a striking girl named Maxine Ratliff, who studied art history at Barnard, and they begin to flirt. The next morning she calls him and invites him to dinner at her house, warning him that she lives with her parents and laughing off his worry that they will mind him coming over.

When he arrives at the house with a bottle of wine, he is stunned by its Greek Revival architecture. Maxine greets him at the door after a few minutes, looking carelessly alluring, and leads him into the grand kitchen and dining area, where Gogol meets her mother, Lydia. He is awestruck by her elegance and the beauty of the house as Maxine gives him a tour. At dinner he meets Gerald, her father, as he is included in the careful ritual of the luxuriant, lingering family meal, so different from the ones he remembers from his own home. They discuss art, culture, his background, and India, emptying three bottles of wine. Maxine and Gogol hit it off, left alone to clean up afterward.

Almost effortlessly, Gogol becomes integrated into their lives. He is in love with Maxine, and with her lifestyle—expensive, rhythmic, elegant. The biggest difference between them, he feels, is not her messiness, but that she has never wished to be anyone else. She is always comfortable and without regrets as she discusses ex-boyfriends. Her relationship with her parents, one of admiration and emulation, is also completely different from his own. Gerald and Lydia, who are openly affectionate, remind Gogol of the distance in his own parents’ relationship, a distance that had always seemed normal, inevitable. When one day Maxine complains about his studio, asking him to move in with her, Gogol happily agrees, leaving just a nameless mailbox and an answering machine behind.

Gogol soon makes a home of the Ratliffs’ house, running in the mornings with Gerald, taking their dog Silas out for walks, and helping them to prepare for dinner parties—minimalistic, elegant affairs that contrast in his mind with the noisy Bengali gatherings of his youth. At times Gogol feels conscious that his life there is somehow a betrayal of his parents, who do not know about Maxine, and who would never be comfortable in a place like this one.

Gerald and Lydia leave for their annual summer trip to New Hampshire, leaving Maxine and Gogol alone in the hot New York house, which they quickly colonize, making love in every room. In the evenings, Gogol swats at bugs and wishes for the mosquito nets he used to use in Calcutta. He does not go home all summer, using his busy work schedule as an excuse while spending all of his free time with Maxine.

Finally Ashima calls him at work late one evening, asking him to come home and say goodbye to Ashoke before he leaves for a prestigious nine-month teaching fellowship in Ohio. Gogol is annoyed that she has called, at first lying and then admitting that he had already planned to leave with his girlfriend to meet her parents in New Hampshire. His mother pauses, hurt, and asks his girlfriend’s name. She is confused when he says “Max,” his nickname for Maxine. “That’s a boy’s name,” she replies.

Gogol agrees that they will stop off at Pemberton Road for lunch on their way to New Hampshire. He warns Maxine that they will not be able to touch or kiss in front of his parents, and that there will be no wine with lunch—Ashima and Ashoke do not even own a corkscrew. Maxine is amused by the rules, and when they arrive he sees that his suburban home is totally foreign to her. She has brought a gift basket Gogol knows his parents will never open. Maxine admires Ashima’s sari, telling her that her own mother, Lydia, is a curator of textiles at the Met. Ashima does not understand that she is referring to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Ashoke enters and insists that they move their rental car into the driveway so that it is not in the way of harm. Gogol is embarrassed by their fear of disaster and by the too-formal lunch they have prepared, but Maxine is charming as ever. Ashima is pleasantly surprised to hear she lives with her parents, a custom she misses. When it is time for them to leave, Gogol’s parents are a bit embarrassed by Maxine’s affectionate goodbye hugs. When his father says goodbye, Maxine notices he uses the name “Gogol,” which she has never heard before, but later, in the car, Gogol—whom she only knows as Nikhil—says it’s nothing. Gogol is relieved to be back in her world, headed to a corner of the country he has never visited before.

They arrive at the beautiful lakeside house down a remote dirt road and find Gerald and Lydia, lounging with their books. Gogol and Maxine take up residence in a small, unfinished cabin outside the main house. Gogol has never had a vacation like this, which feels like camping. They spend all day in their bathing suits together, with visits from Maxine’s grandparents, Hank and Edith. On his runs around the lake with Gerald, Gogol sees the Ratliff family graveyard, where generations of the family are buried—where Maxine will be buried someday. At night he and Maxine go skinny-dipping in the lake, and make love on the grassy shore.

Gogol falls in love with the pattern of the days here, disconnected from the world. He draws the Ratliffs’ house, a drawing that they put on the mantelpiece and promise to frame. He is amazed at the sense of belonging that they have in this landscape, the secure feeling that allows them to leave all their doors unlocked—in contrast to his own parents, who have just installed an alarm at their home on Pemberton Road. The Ratliffs own even the moon above the lake, Gogol feels, and he is deeply drawn to the idea of returning to a single place year after year. This type of vacation is the opposite of the family road trips, expeditions from motel to motel, from his own memory.

On one canoe journey across the lake, Maxine confides that this is where she lost her virginity, when she was fourteen. He thinks of his life at fourteen, when he was still Gogol—he has told her about this name now, which for her is merely a cute and forgettable fact from his past—and how different it was. Gogol pictures her past and future in this place: growing old, burying her parents in the family graveyard, teaching her children to swim in the lake.

They celebrate Gogol’s twenty-seventh birthday there, the first time he has not been with his parents on his birthday. Friends from around the lake come, and Gogol has an awkward interaction with one woman who asks at what age he moved to America from India. She seems confused to hear that he was born in Boston. As the toast is called and the party sings “Happy Birthday,” Gogol thinks briefly of his parents, but he does not call them. He is awoken that night by the sound of ringing in the main house and stumbles out of bed, mortified that Gerald and Lydia will be woken up by his parents, but it is just a dream. He remembers that his parents do not have his number—that here in the wilderness with Maxine, he is finally free.