I usually read the Goodreads reviews of a book immediately after I'm done reading it, to see what I can safely leave out of my own review because it's been well-covered already, or if I have any marginal or unusual insights to share. I usually don't have any of those "special" insights; this website does a great job of including a wide range of mostly valid literary and personal observations. However, this is the first time after reading the reviews I've been bewildered by how many people got nothing out of this book, or seemed to miss the point, or even when they did enjoy it, did so as a person ogling at a weird insect under glass does - with the interest that comes from looking at the quaintly foreign (those comments are, probably unfairly, the most infuriating to me of all). And in a sense a book like this, written about a part of non-western culture but largely published for and read by a western audience, is destined to be treated with at best a sort of unintentionally imperialistic curiosity and at worst confusion or disdain. Somewhat ironically, that is one of the major themes of this novel: how a culturally complicated entity like this - whether that be the novel's protagonist Gogol Ganguli or the novel itself - is at home nowhere, is never received with full understanding and unconditional acceptance in any community, is at once traitor to its origins and alien to its new society, is characterized by compromised values derived from two different moral and social universes, is simultaneously disgusted by and inexorably drawn to both these universes. I suspect that it is hard to understand this struggle to form a stable cultural identity unless you have experienced that kind of struggle yourself. 
 A couple of specific criticisms I would like to rebut: 
 "The Namesake is overly critical of/exoticizes Bengali culture and praises western culture". Only a very shallow reading of this novel could produce such an interpretation. The main character Gogol often favors American culture over Bengali culture, yes. That oughtn't to be confused for the novel itself sanctioning his view, which gradually changes to a more appreciative one by the end anyway. Note too that the most successful relationship in the novel is the arranged marriage between Gogol's parents, in comparison to the 100% failure of all of the other "western" relationships. 
 "Nothing happens in this novel, it's boring." If you are one of the people who thinks that a traumatic train crash setting off a chain of events where a family uproots their entire life to try and make it thousands of miles away from everything they know and love is equivalent to "nothing happening", you're probably white, still live in your hometown, and think "On The Road" is a great book. 
 "Lahiri writes in a flat way, just listing events". This is because she doesn't tell you what to feel directly. She is sparse with her descriptions, sparse even with adverbs and adjectives. She is brilliantly subtle. A quick example from a random page, describing the first time Gogol brings home an american girl to meet his parents. 
 "Gogol is only partly attentive to the conversation. He is overly aware that [his parents] are not used to passing things around the table, or to chewing their food with their mouths fully closed. They avert their eyes when Maxine accidentally leans over to run her hand through his hair." 
 There's no flowery description here, but you can immediately sense Gogol's acute embarrassment and discomfort on behalf of both his parents and his girlfriend, both parties totally unaware of how they are breaking the other's social code. This is simple and powerful. The reader gets the picture without unnecessary additional exposition. 
 I do feel that the story flagged in its final chapters with what felt like a contrived attempt to bookend the "Nikolai Gogol" theme it created early on and was arranged around; I also didn't much care for a distracting (though well-written) chapter told from the perspective of a character who appears and disappears too quickly for the details of her internal life to be relevant to the narrative. But overall Lahiri's writing, which brings out the tragedy of everyday life very effectively, was a pleasure to read.