From: The London Review of Books (October 4, 2007)
Not Entirely Like Me
By AMIT CHAUDHURI
[...]
As reviews of Mohsin Hamid’s second novel began to appear earlier this year, I was reminded, for some reason, of that encounter from almost twenty years ago. Not that my story and Hamid’s are exactly similar; but there are several points of contact. Sometimes, while reading reviews of a book, you find (especially if there’s something about it that’s begun to intrigue you) that you’ve begun to invent it, that you’re already becoming familiar, in a silently persuaded way, with a work you really don’t know. At some point, my story became part of what I imagined Hamid’s novel to be. What had brought these two stories together in my mind – one a memory, the other an outline of a novel I hadn’t read – was the crucial piece of information that Hamid’s book was a monologue, or a dialogue in which you never heard the other voice, which emerges from a chance, even bizarre, encounter between a Pakistani man and someone who at first appears to be an American tourist, on the streets of Lahore. The novel is structured around this encounter, but it isn’t directly about it: what it’s about (in the form of a long confession addressed to the hapless and increasingly ‘reluctant’ interlocutor) is the speaker’s previous life in America, leading up to his present one in Lahore. But the idea of the encounter and, along with it, of the present moment, the here and now, is an all-important one to the novel, despite its being a structural device (or maybe precisely because of this), primarily a part of what used to be called ‘form’, and only secondarily, and by implication, informing ‘content’. These elements must have led to that feeling of growing recognition and to that interweaving in my mind; the notion of the unforeseen encounter and its consequences, or its ultimate lack of consequence, and, more pressingly, that of the urgency of the present moment, its magic and deceptions, its spaciousness and promise, its political immediacy, and the constant, unfulfillable sense of illumination it offers.
Having become almost too well acquainted with my construct of the novel, I risked being disappointed when I read it. That wasn’t to be. The former was quite different from the latter, but the journey from one to the other was seamless, and, from the start, I was gripped. The differences were obvious. Hamid’s narrator, Changez, is neither entirely like me nor my companion on the coach. He is one of South Asia’s proliferating and, by now, customary success stories, the sort magazines probably leap to associate with India, but could equally well come out of Pakistan. A Princeton graduate, like Hamid, Changez – again, not unlike Hamid – has worked in what might loosely be called the corporate-financial world in New York, a driven and exceptionally energetic domain. In contrast, I strongly suspect, to the man I met in Marble Arch, Changez used to be a believer in Western corporate meritocracy. Indeed, he’d been a star performer for an acquisitions firm called Underwood Samson; the fruits of belief have been tangible, the costs – which Changez becomes more aware of after 11 September – intangible and alienating, as they often are. Changez had a girlfriend, Erica (most reviewers have pointed out Hamid’s penchant for allegorical naming), a delicate, privileged, quite probably Wasp woman with literary talent and ambitions, with whom he had a curious, largely asexual relationship. The relationship, like Erica’s sanity, begins to come undone by the second half of this short novel; under some mysterious psychological duress, possibly to do with Chris, a lover who died (several works are glancingly but effectively invoked by Hamid, including ‘The Dead’), she becomes increasingly inaccessible and remote. At the same time, Changez’s treasured American self, especially after it experiences a contradictory and scandalous moment of happiness on witnessing the destruction of the Twin Towers on television in a hotel room in Manila, begins to crumble, as does his sense of his corporate mission:
‘The following evening was supposed to be our last in Manila. I was in my room, packing my things. I turned on the television and saw what at first I took to be a film. But as I continued to watch, I realised that it was not fiction but news. I stared as one – and then the other – of the twin towers of New York’s World Trade Center collapsed. And then I smiled. Yes, despicable as it may sound, my initial reaction was to be remarkably pleased.
‘Your disgust is evident; indeed, your large hand has, perhaps without your noticing, clenched into a fist.’
‘Not fiction but news’: Hamid is unobtrusively, but constantly, addressing the reader, hinting at how to read his novel; how not to be manipulated and led in the way that, in a sense, Changez’s companion is, but to become attuned to its hidden, recurrent inversions. There’s an almost delightful allegorical symmetry to the flow of events, as well as a sensuousness and finish that might belong to some other form of art: music, perhaps.
Despite its minute probing into the narrator’s thoughts, this is not a conventional psychological novel; much of its magic – the enchantment and innocence of the relationship, the absolute familiarity and foreignness of America, the fragrant boisterousness and menace of Lahore – hinges on the unsaid. Hamid manages marvellously well in creating a novel that’s rendered entirely in terms of the spoken word, and governed by the shape of what’s evaded or not uttered. Two registers of the word ‘formal’ come to mind as one reads. One has to do with politeness, etiquette, and even over-elaboration and circumlocution. In the book, it has to do with the way in which something spontaneous and immediate, like speech, is constantly qualified by adornment (‘irresistibly refined or oddly anachronistic’, as Changez says while speculating about the qualities in him that Erica might have been drawn to), and comes to seem disorienting and at one remove. The other has to do with Hamid’s own craft and practice, his working within the genre of the novella, James’s ‘blessed nouvelle’, with its unique tensions, restrictions and essential playfulness. The pressures and deflections of the form allow Hamid to visit the various genres that are common to South Asian anglophone writing, which are often connected with the revelation of identity – autobiography; travelogue; the novel of diaspora or exile – and to commit himself to none of these. For both author and narrator are involved in various kinds of disclosure, and yet are always making the temptations of disclosure and topicality (to do with Pakistani, immigrant or Muslim identity; to do with 9/11) surrender to formal – in both senses of the word – considerations. The result is a cool equipoise that is not possible in ‘real life’, where our desires for both the earthly and the immutable generally end up being so messy; but no less moving or true for having achieved a sort of perfection.
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