I’m not sure who “they” are, but they say that with good writing, the writer disappears, so you never think about technique; you just get swept away in the story. I really enjoyed Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake, but I was a little distracted for the first few chapters, because everything was happening in the present tense. I was watching things happen, but I wasn’t swept away.

The way she wrote, it felt like she was setting up the scene, and at any moment, she would start telling the story. When I realized that the whole novel was written this way, I had to set the book down and take a breath before I could go on.

Then I got swept away. And when it was all over, I thought about the writer again and her choice to write the story of Gogol Ganguli and his family like it was happening right now and forever. It’s the story of a family who moves to a faraway place and holds onto the little pieces of their culture that they can grasp in the foreign land. It’s the story of people feeling like they don’t belong, like they will always be different from everyone around them.

It’s a universal story, an eternal one. It’s happening. Now.

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