Jhumpa Lahiri emerged as a fully formed short story writer with the 1999 publication of her first collection, Interpreter of Maladies.

There were no stories in that book that focused exclusively on the peculiarities of life among wacky or maladjusted 20-somethings, or that tried to dazzle with linguistic or stylistic tricks, or that tried to shock the reader into paying attention.

Some initial short story collections seem to come dressed in flashing lights, performing an elaborate tap routine, desperate to impress. Instead, Lahiri wrote with the grace and poise of a master, patiently spinning tales of family life among Indians and Indian immigrants to America, in polished prose straight out of Strunk & White. Her technique clearly worked, as it won her the 2000 Pulitzer Prize, along with heaps of other accolades.

It will come as no surprise to Lahiri's fans that her first novel, The Namesake, is an equal success. What may surprise them is that Lahiri accomplishes this by employing the most mundane plot imaginable, moving the book along at such a serene pace that this plot is hardly detectable. Yet The Namesake, a coming-of-age story in the most basic possible sense, is nevertheless a page-turner.

It is compelling because it tells the story of a simple human life, a life shaped by no unusual tragedy, adventure or exceptional good fortune, a life not unlike the lives that many people lead, whether they are the children of immigrants or not.

The Namesake opens in 1968, introducing Ashima and Ashoke Ganguli, a couple of recent immigrants who have moved from Calcutta, India, to Cambridge, Mass., and are expecting their first child. Ashima is nervous about having her baby in a foreign country, away from her family, and while she waits in the hospital before her delivery, she reflects on how different America is from India, with each woman separated from the others in the room by a privacy curtain.

"She wishes the curtains were open, so that she could talk to the American women. Perhaps one of them has had a child already, can tell her what to expect. But she has gathered that Americans, in spite of their public declarations of affection, in spite of their miniskirts and bikinis, in spite of their hand-holding on the street and lying on top of each other on the Cambridge Common, prefer their privacy."

Ashima gives birth to a boy, and the hospital record keeper tells them that they cannot leave without filling out a name on his birth certificate. The problem is that the Gangulis have been awaiting a letter from Ashima's grandmother, who has named many children in her family, but the letter never arrived.

Lahiri explains that Bengalis each have a "pet name" and a "good name." While friends and families call a person by the pet name, "good names appear on envelopes, on diplomas, in telephone directories, and in all other public places."

They decide to fill out the certificate with a pet name, Gogol, and choose the boy's good name later. Gogol is named for his father's favorite writer, Nikolai Gogol, and for most of his life Gogol thinks there is nothing more to the story of his name than that.

It is only after years of Gogol's enduring shame about his name, which he finds ridiculous, that his father one day tells him the truth, and shares with him the story about how reading a book by Nikolai Gogol saved his life and changed its course irrevocably. But before that revelation, we follow Gogol as he attends school for the first time, as his sister is born, as he spends Saturday nights at his parents' Bengali friends' houses, as he excels in school and attends Yale, graduates, moves to Manhattan, begins a career in architecture, and tries his hand at love and marriage.

The suspense of The Namesake is the suspense provided by the life of anyone a person cares about - the reader wants to see Gogol happy, settled and fulfilled, just as his parents do. We also want him to call his mother, already.

This is especially true when Gogol falls in with the pretentious New York friends of his wife, who engage in meaningless conversations at dinner parties. "To Gogol's left, Edith is discussing her reasons for not eating bread. 'I just have so much more energy if I stay off wheat,' she maintains. Gogol has nothing to say to these people. He doesn't care about their dissertation topics, or their dietary restrictions, or the color of their walls."

Gogol has a more authentic core to his life than do these people, rooted in close ties with his family, and he will remember this before long.

When the book ends in the year 2000, Gogol is 32, and although the ending satisfies, Lahiri refrains from tying the threads of his life together neatly. In this way, Lahiri enhances the feeling that she has just presented a slice of a real life in The Namesake.

It also becomes clear that despite the Indian cultural particulars that Lahiri describes so well, this story of the son of immigrant parents making his way in the world follows the pattern of a classic American tale.

Jenny Shank's short stories have appeared in CutBank, Michigan Quarterly Review and other publications, and one was recently nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She lives in Denver.