From: The New York Review of Books (October 11, 2007)
Review
In the Terror House of Mirrors
By SARAH KERR
[...]
Far from seeming bothered by the literariness of literature, Mohsin Hamid appears to savor it. Ambiguity starts out as the delicate organizing principle of his novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist. By the end of the book it has turned into the disturbing payoff. Hamid is a youngish writer born in Pakistan and educated at Princeton. He worked for a time as a New York finance consultant before quitting to write, and eventually moving to London. His first novel, Moth Smoke, centers on a young man from Lahore, intellectually gifted but stranded in a mortifying class limbo. With his military father dead, the young man's career depends on the intercession of people he's reluctant to ask for help. Jealously, often numbed by drugs, he watches as his rich, heedless best friend goes off to America, picks up a cosmopolitan sheen, and returns home, likely headed for a career of high-status corruption. Though the novel's construction feels scattered, it has energy and shrewd observations of contemporary urban Pakistan. In it we learn, for instance, how young Muslims flout their temperance laws, police fear the military, and how for all but the rich, air conditioning arbitrarily shuts down.
Hamid's new novel builds similar elements into a more elegant form, through which he weaves a steadier tension. At the center of The Reluctant Fundamentalist is another promising, frustrated son of Lahore. His name, Changez, sounds as allegorical as the Doll's, but according to interviews with Hamid the name refers obliquely to Genghis Khan, conqueror of Muslims, rather than to a concept of change. He comes from a once-elite family (how elite and how trustworthy a witness he is on the subject hover as questions), and is more painfully aware than anyone around him of his fragile standing.
Still, Changez has clearly tasted privilege, and for much of the novel, though only twenty-five years old, he describes in nostalgic past tense the chance he once had to claim that privilege for life. He attended Princeton. After college, in a kind of finance-world version of Top Gun, he beat out the competition to work at a small, famously ruthless Manhattan consulting firm. His job was to study the fundamentals of client businesses, sometimes in the States and sometimes in farflung foreign locales, and then to advise them on which segments of their business (and so, indirectly, which employees) to dump. Also he was in love, a love that seems to have been only fleetingly, distractedly, and limply half-returned by a beautiful Princeton classmate named Erica.
When we meet Changez at the novel's beginning, in a café in the historic Lahore district of Old Anarkali, he has put the American period decisively behind him. To tell this story, Hamid has chosen an unusual structure. The novel will be a long monologue by Changez. To be precise: it will be Changez's half of a conversation, broken into chapters, with an American visitor to Lahore who is never named, directly pictured, or given a voice. Changez strikes up the stranger's acquaintance on the novel's first page. By the second page he is displaying a solicitousness that could be read as either generous and eager to show the best side of Pakistan by treating this representative of America like a VIP, or else controlling and potentially hostile:
“Come, tell me, what were you looking for? Surely, at this time of day, only one thing could have brought you to the district of Old Anarkali —named, as you may be aware, after a courtesan immured for loving a prince—and that is the quest for the perfect cup of tea. Have I guessed correctly? Then allow me, sir, to suggest my favorite among these many establishments.”
The odd formality of Changez's speech here gives a sense of the novel's lightly applied brush of the surreal; the idea of tea seems a winking nod to classical tale-telling with its opening invitation to sit for a while. And here already is the mild unease we'll be made to feel throughout, not quite knowing the intentions of Changez— or the intentions, for that matter, of his conversation partner. Has this apparently coincidental meeting been plotted by one party looking to catch the other unawares? For just a split second, Hamid lets pass through the reader's mind a couple of nervous-making scenarios. Could Changez have somehow drifted out of sympathy with the US to such an extent that he wishes America harm? Or perhaps that's the suspicion of the nameless American, whom Changez describes at various points as possessing a bulked-up chest and the hardened face of a man on a mission and wearing a suit with a bulge in the inside jacket pocket that could theoretically be the outline of an undercover agent's gun.
But maybe we the readers are the ones who jump to conclusions; maybe the book is intended as a Rorschach to reflect back our unconscious assumptions. In our not knowing lies the novel's suspense, which is skillfully kept close to but never crosses into camp (although Changez's fussy, persistent invitations to stretch out this companionship for a few more hours did once remind me of the sketch several years back on Saturday Night Live in which a half-mad mustachioed Christopher Walken talked into the camera attempting to seduce an unseen woman).
Maybe Changez just really wants to talk. And maybe what he has to say could be seen as somehow representative of what the many thousands of people like him from all over the world, people who have lived in and adored but grown disenchanted with America, might say if they had the chance. His memories are certainly rich with symbolism for us to unpack. There is Erica, blond and athletic, with family wealth that pays for her idealism, a winning but insensitive habit of emotional directness, and an unconscious power, for which she doesn't take responsibility, to injure when she withdraws her attention. Further loading up the parallel to America today, Erica was once strong and hearty but after college grew weak, depressed, absorbed in uncertainty since the death of a beloved boyfriend.
In any case, the thinness of her character doesn't really interfere with the qualities one savors after finishing the book. At his best Hamid makes interesting, occasionally electric use of a thematizing intellectual imagination, bringing to life some frisson of history almost as a stimulating professor might. Changez really falls for Erica, for instance, while they are traveling with a group—in Greece, that crossroads of East and West, where the origins of democracy sing in one key to America, and the depth and the proud, gloried longevity speak in quite another key, but just as intimately, to Pakistan.
So, too, when Changez travels for work. One of the most revealing moments in the book is a seeming throwaway. Presumably hours into his monologue, after he has been treating his tea companion to a long chain of sensitively described, often pedantically well-informed observations and memories, he mentions a trip he took for the financial firm to the Philippines. While on the job there, he marveled at Manila's gleaming business district:
“I expected to find a city like Lahore —or perhaps Karachi; what I found instead was a place of skyscrapers and superhighways. Yes, Manila had its slums; one saw them on the drive from the airport: vast districts of men in dirty white undershirts lounging idly in front of auto-repair shops—like a poorer version of the 1950s America depicted in such films as Grease. But Manila's glittering skyline and walled enclaves for the ultra-rich were unlike anything I had seen in Pakistan.”
To envy Manila and interpret its poverty through the lens of Grease! This is an intelligent, educated, well-traveled, even philosophical man. That does not exempt him from foggy thinking, and an insecurity that converts before it can even be registered into a kind of nostalgia. In fact, Changez displays multiple provincialities here. One has Lahore as its comfortable frame of reference; another luxuriates in the arrogant, sealed-off, denatured bubble of international finance. And then there's the third, generic, global dimension of popular culture. It's absorbed, spongelike, through hit movies and owned at this point by anyone who wants to stake a claim.
What prompted Changez to leave America? It was while in Manila, he tells the American, that he saw the news of September 11, and "despicable as it may sound, my initial reaction was to be remarkably pleased." Responding to the American's apparent agitation at this, Changez reassures him that he felt great sympathy for the suffering victims:
“But at that moment, my thoughts were not with the victims of the attack—death on television moves me most when it is fictitious and happens to characters with whom I have built up relationships over multiple episodes —no, I was caught up in the symbolism of it all, the fact that someone had so visibly brought America to her knees.”
Eventually, the affair with the ever gloomier Erica over, angered by the bombing of Afghanistan while the formerly backslapping colleagues at his firm are disturbed by his increasingly erratic work and the new beard on his face, Changez seems almost to fade away from the States, to dematerialize, a flamed-out cosmopolitan, rather than to actively leave. The long afternoon and night in Old Anarkali wind down, or perhaps wind up, to the murkily opaque revelation by Changez of what he's doing today. He teaches at a university in Lahore, and has become a mentor to dissenting students—part of a network advocating a drawing back from America and its influence.
And how far does this go? Changez's verbose explanations invite multiple, clashing interpretations; though we can't hear or see the American, we sense his tension. Hamid literally leaves us at the end in a kind of alley, the story suddenly suspended; it's even possible that some act of violence might occur. But more likely, we are left holding the bag of conflicting worldviews. We're left to ponder the symbolism of Changez having been caught up in the game of symbolism—a game we ourselves have been known to play. We're deep into the house of mirrors of stereotypes that seems so key to the experience of being alive now. Once the province of the provincial, now so hard not to resort to in order to organize mentally a chaotic world. Unjust, yet such stereotypes are not always devoid of truth. Not ordinarily great friends of the novel, but then we live in interesting times.
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