The Namesake

The day of their first anniversary, Gogol and Mo go out to a restaurant Astrid and Donald recommended. Mo feels oddly disturbed and unsettled, and she thinks about her love for Gogol, how “he had accepted her, had obliterated her former disgrace” (294). She finds the restaurant unsatisfactory and small things irritate her.

Two days later, her new teaching semester begins. She has completed her orals and only has her dissertation to complete. As she arrives to the NYU building, she sees an ambulance and soon realizes that Alice, the administrative assistant, suddenly died from an aneurysm. Alone in her department, Mo feels compelled to finish Alice’s duties of sorting the department’s mail. She comes across a letter of inquiry written by Dimitri Desjardins, a man she used to know when she was a teenager finishing high school and he was a postgraduate at Princeton. He flirted with her, but then rejected her, yet for years after he would send her postcards and books he would like her to read until they finally lost touch.

Mo calls Dimitri the following week, and they start having a sexual affair, meeting Mondays and Wednesdays after her class. At first, Mo feels guilty for cheating on Gogol, but soon the excitement takes her, and she begins to enjoy herself, especially as Dimitri makes no demands on her.