Side 3 , Side 2 : The Beatles in Jhumpa Lahiri ’ s The Namesake
that the Beatles were and are universally beloved because better than any other band they captured in music and lyric the experience of love , loss , and recovery . Gogol / Nikhil “ does ” for the Beatles what his father “ does ” for Nikolai Gogol . From his own early shyness to first love , from dating to marriage , then divorce and , by book ’ s end , signs of acceptance and recovery , he shows where and why the Beatles ( for reasons different than the Russian genius ) resonate so deeply across borders , across time . Gogol / Nikhil does not say that they “ save ” his life after Moushumi ’ s infidelity ; he does not say that their “ Indian ” songs point to the ambivalence at the core of his divided identity . He does not have to say any such thing . If Lahiri respects readers enough to have them figure out why her hero is listening to the respective sides of the White Album and Abbey Road at those crucial times in his life , then she respects them enough to let them fill in all the rest by themselves . To fill in all the rest means to extrapolate from Gogol ’ s tortured self-consciousness as a youth and his happiness , then despair , as an adult that the Beatles have been his most trusted “ soundtrack ” all along . It is as easy to picture this abandoned husband listening to “ Let It Be ” repeatedly in the months following his wife ’ s revelation of her affair as it is to assume years earlier he included “ Got to Get You into My Life ” on the mix-tape he made for his college girlfriend Ruth .
Proof of the group ’ s preternatural grasp of the arc of love from infatuation to despair is immediate . Despite their youth on their first long-play album , 1963 ’ s Please Please Me�Lennon was 22-years-old , McCartney 20 years , Harrison 19 years , and Starr 22 years�they seem to “ get ” it all ( 8 of the 14 songs were originals ). Astonished teenagers heard instantly hummable tunes about first sighting of the beloved (“ I Saw Her Standing There ”), courtship (“ Love Me Do ”), devotion (“ Ask Me Why ,” “ Baby , It ’ s You ”), sexual intensity (“ A Taste of
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