From: The Seattle Times (April 10, 2007)
An American dream turns to dust in the rubble of the twin towers
By PAULA BOCK
The summer before 9/11, Mohsin Hamid completed the first draft of a novel about a Muslim man working in corporate America who decides to return to his native Pakistan. Then the World Trade Center was bombed, effectively swamping his story. It took the novelist years to digest the fallout and incorporate current events into "The Reluctant Fundamentalist."
Lucky he did.
Sept. 11 serves as pivot for an existential crisis suffered by Hamid's narrator, Changez, a recent Princeton grad (straight-A student, soccer star) who hails from a once wealthy Punjabi family in Pakistan. Like his central character, Hamid grew up in Lahore, attended Princeton and Harvard Law School, worked in corporate New York and returned to Pakistan after 9/11.
The novel opens at an outdoor café in the old quarter of Lahore as Changez chats with a burly unidentified American about the perfect cup of tea. Or, rather, chats at him. As teatime becomes dinner, and dusk deepens into night, Changez unfolds his life story to the uneasy stranger who is not just a Quiet American — he is silent.
After Princeton, Changez joined a prestigious New York "valuation" firm and also became smitten with Erica, a beautiful but emotionally fragile classmate from Manhattan's upper echelon who is still mourning her first love, a childhood boyfriend who died of cancer. The high-flying job and budding love affair open portals to New York's high society, and like Jay Gatsby before him, Changez is a talented social climber. Yet because he's also an outsider to western culture, his insights lend a different flavor.
While traveling with wealthy classmates in Greece, Changez notes their heedlessness with money, their self-righteousness in dealing with Greeks twice their age, their lack of respect for elders. "I found myself wondering by what quirk of human history my companions — many of whom I would have regarded as upstarts in my own country, so devoid of refinement were they — were in a position to conduct themselves in the world as though they were its ruling class."
Changez's voice is extraordinary. Cultivated, restrained, yet also barbed and passionate, it evokes the power of butler Stevens in Kazuo Ishiguro's "The Remains of the Day." Hamid meticulously maintains this voice throughout the 184-page monologue, even as Changez implodes post-9/11.
On business in Manila, Changez witnesses the collapse of the twin towers on television. "... I smiled. Yes, despicable as it may sound, my initial reaction was to be remarkably pleased ... I was caught up in the symbolism of it all, the fact that someone had so visibly brought America to her knees." Schadenfreude — even though Changez was educated at an elite American university, infatuated with an American woman, and earning a lucrative American salary.
Initially, Changez cannot articulate why he feels a growing distaste for America and for the American he was fast becoming. But post-9/11, as he's hassled (because of his new in-your-face beard?), as Erica abandons him for her dead lover and his family in Pakistan is threatened by war with India, his discontent crystallizes.
"I had always resented the manner in which America conducted itself in the world; your country's constant interference in the affairs of others was insufferable," Changez reflects while flying back from Santiago after purposefully botching business there. "Finance was the primary means by which the American empire exercised its power. It was right for me to refuse to participate any longer in facilitating this." His anger recalls the wrath of Kip, the Sikh demolitions expert in Michael Ondaatje's "The English Patient" who rails against western nations after hearing news of the atomic bombings in Japan, convinced America would never have inflicted such pain on a white nation.
Of course, on 9/11, America was the bombing victim. So why is Changez lashing out against America? It's because, at his core, Changez still considers himself a man from Lahore, a foreigner whom America will never truly accept. As an outsider, he feels personally insulted by American foreign policy, particularly its heavy hand in Asia during the 50 years after Kip's war. "Vietnam, Korea, the straits of Taiwan, the Middle East and now Afghanistan," he resentfully reels off the list. "In each of the major conflicts ... that ringed my mother continent of Asia, America played a central role."
That 9/11 should trigger rage — against America — in the soul of a Princeton soccer star who once embraced America is Hamid's seething commentary on America's reputation in the non-western world today. The author develops Changez's character so convincingly that by mid-book, readers understand Changez's anger, even if they don't agree with it.
It's too bad Hamid decided to punt on the last page with an ambiguous ending worthy of a freshman fiction-writing seminar. The rest of the novel is brilliantly written and well worth a read.
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