The New York Times is simply too much in love with Jhumpa Lahiri and her books. She makes it a rare three in a row. I mean she has showed up on the pages of the gray old lady, three weeks in a row.

Its incorrigible mildness and its ungilded lilies aside, Lahiri’s novel is unfailingly lovely in its treatment of Gogol’s relationship with his father. This is the classic American parent-child bond — snakebit, oblique, half-mumbled — and in Lahiri’s rendering, it touches on quiet perfection.