Popular Culture Review 30.2
the birthday scene , Cardozo states that the “ cultural work of the novel ... lies in its assiduous exploration of Bengali American experience as a particular form of a more general struggle for identity�an intertextual structure that is simultaneously generative and restrictive ” ( 16 ). Although Cardozo is alert to the ebb and flow of Gogol ’ s existential dilemma , at no point does she mention his fixation on the Beatles and their music ’ s place in his identity formation . Their importance in this regard is backlit by several other rock references in The Namesake to artists such as The Who , Dylan , and Clapton , and to the albums London Calling and Talking Heads : 77 , names and titles cited matter-of-factly , not allusively or synchronically . They are what Gogol listens to during certain phases of youth . They tell readers about his changing tastes in rock , and they measure the passage of time ; they are the same popular albums and rock stars that fans in his generation listen to ; but they do not illuminate , with the same intensity as the Beatles do , the young man ’ s emotional struggles .
SIDE 3 OF THE WHITE ALBUM , SIDE 2 OF ABBEY ROAD
A passage in Beatles fan Ron Schaumburg ’ s memoir Growing Up with the Beatles conveys the effect these four young Englishmen had on millions of young adolescents is the 1960s : “ As I passed my twelfth birthday , I reached the years of a new maturity , of a slowly growing sense of love and sexuality . I found that Beatle songs expressed the hurts and happinesses [ sic ] of those twelve years .... The Beatles sang to me , taking my joy and my pain and explaining it to me in terms I could understand ” ( 29 ). A generation later , they cast the same spell on Gogol Ganguli , giving him joy as he figures out his role as a young American male whose Bengali parents cling to the customs and values of a homeland that is theirs , not his . He is the type of teenager that Devin McKinney , in Magic Circles :
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