Jhumpa Lahiri

THE NAMESAKE
By Jhumpa Lahiri (Houghton Mifflin, $24)

If you haven't, catch-up is a cinch. Her voice has the same velvet-over-steel strength: gentle, precise, and ever-so-slightly bemused. And her eye misses nothing. This novel's characters, Calcutta-born New England transplants and their American-born children, might have crossed paths with the uprooted Bengalis of her short stories. Yet Lahiri has broadened and deepened her range with this slim volume, which follows the endearing Gogol Ganguli through his 30-some birthdays to the year 2000.

He's born to traditional Bengali parents, whose arranged marriage took place in Calcutta before they emigrated to Cambridge, Mass., MIT, and a baffling new life. Unnerved by hospital rules that their baby needs a name to leave the premises, his parents' deadpan birthday present is "Gogol," a proper name in neither Russia nor India. Gogol won't learn its almost mystical meaning for his father for decades. Full disclosureof anythingis clearly "not the Bengali way."

Lahiri traces that way luminously, keeping her focus on Gogol yet never abandoning his diligent, loving, frequently flummoxed parents. He's a good kid, studious enough to get into Yale and become an architect, yet tentative, touched by shadows from a country he knows almost not at all. Now calling himself "Nikhil," his "good" (public) Bengali name, he chooses lovers in almost defiant opposition to what's expected. Then, in a move that amuses them both, he settles on the elegant Moushumi Mazoomdar, a childhood acquaintance and his mother's choice for marriage.

Although Moushumi is as driven and as conflicted as Gogol (she's lived in Paris, pursuing a Ph.D. in French literature), they seem the perfect second-generation love story. But if you think The Namesake ends so tidily, you gravely underestimate Lahiri's depths as a storytelleror as an interpreter of families. SHEILA BENSON

Jhumpa Lahiri will read at UW Kane Hall, Room 120 (free tickets required from Elliott Bay Book Co., 101 S. Main St., 206-624-6600), 7 p.m. Fri., Oct. 3.

I'm not sure David Guterson needs more money. If he provokes one more moolah tsunami like Snow Falling on Cedars, Bainbridge Island might get scraped to bedrock, like Eastern Washington after the prehistoric Montana ice dam broke. He does need a hit, however, after his numbing second novel, East of the Mountains, went south despite some lovely nature writing and deliberative wrestling with the flaming angel of Big Moral Issues.

So I am thrilled to report that his third novel puts Guterson back on the popular-fiction map. (So is his new publisher, who read 50 pages of the manuscript and gave him a seven-figure deal.) Our Lady of the Forest blends some of the appeal of Stephen King's uncanny tales set in white-trash rural blue-collarville and John Updike's fables of small-town spiritual yearning among the ineffably sensitive and the effing horny.

The lady of the title is the Virgin Mary, glimpsed in a radiant arboreal vision near North Fork, a down-and-out logging town that sounds a lot like Forks, Wash. Visionary Ann is a teenage runaway who fled a rapist stepdad to live as a squatter in the woods, picking mushrooms to survive. Her fellow 'shroomer, Carolyn, is no Catholic believer (she believes she'll have another beer), but she's concerned for the increasingly out-there Ann. Not averse to making a few bucks off the phenomenon, Carolyn appoints herself the mystic's spokesperson as the faithful gather in their thousands to trample the moss and witness Ann's Marian ecstasies.

Father Collins, the young local priest, feels fascinated and torn by Ann. He has doubts about his own callinglike an Updike narrator, only with more guilt and less revolting self-regard; maybe he's more like a Hawthorne hero, only not that guilty. He's touched by Ann's innocent, instinctual faith, and he desperately wards off thoughts of touching her where it counts. (They share a carnal nature: Ann and Collins are both passionate onanists.)

The symbolically named Tom Cross has the most tormented interest in Ann. He's an embittered logger forced to sell his once-thriving business and work at the hateful local prison. He lives at a local motel, drinking and stewing over his past (his wife left him; his son was paralyzed in a logging accident). Yet even as Tom lusts self-defeatingly for the Punjabi innkeeper's curry-scented wife, he yearns for the peace and purity that Ann has found. And just maybe there might be a miracle cure for his son.

Forest could use more otherworldliness and plot complication, but it's thoroughly absorbing; and the wonderfully drawn characters draw us in, inexorably. Guterson writes virtuoso dialogue (even though, like Updike's, his narrator's voice can spill too much into his characters), and he now equals Raymond Carver as a painter of Northwest squalor and domestic strife. TIM APPELO