Like many others in this part of the world, I had greatly enjoyed Mohsin Hamid’s first novel, Moth Smoke. The book spoke to me at many levels - as a story I found it compelling and indeed heartbreaking; as the voice of my generation in the subcontinent it is quite unparalleled. So I picked up his now Booker-longlisted The Reluctant Fundamentalist with an expectation bordering on excitement.
The cover of the Indian edition - unlike the garish and oversimplified covers of the UK and US editions - is evocative and even mildly menacing. The hardcover felt solid in my hand, and it was not until I got home and peeped inside that I felt somewhat deceived by the large type and the generous page-padding. I plunged straight into it nevertheless.
The novel traces the life of Changez, a young Pakistani man who falls in love with, gets disillusioned by, and eventually abandons America. Changez tells his story in first person to a nervous American stranger, over the course of a long dinner in Lahore’s Anarkali market.
Hamid’s storytelling, as always, is top class. The monologue format works for him the same way the handheld camera works for Oliver Stone in Platoon - it gives a personal, point-of-view feel to the narrative, and at the same time makes it edgy and unstable. Since Hamid did not give a voice to the other party in the conversation, the reader fills in the gaps with his own imagination. At least for me, this worked beautifully — this mystery enhanced the ominous atmosphere of the overall story.
The prose continues to have the lyrical quality Hamid displayed in Moth Smoke. Whether he is describing a puddle slowly forming in the Lahore rain, or an imaginary scooter ride with a long-lost woman, or even the politics of facial hair on brown skin, Hamid does it with extreme gentleness and good humour. Not for him the clever wordsmithery of a Salman Rushdie or an Arundhati Roy — in my mind he firmly belongs to the Vikram Seth school of subtle imagery. I also love the way he weaves in multiple cultural references — classic signs of an outsider looking in — into his prose. Consider the following paragraph as an example:
Every fall, Princeton raised her skirt for the corporate recruiters who came onto campus and — as you say in America — showed them some skin. The skin Princeton showed was good skin, of course—young, eloquent, and clever as can be — but even among all that skin, I knew in my senior year that I was something special. I was a perfect breast, if you will — tan, succulent, seemingly defiant of gravity — and I was confident of getting any job I wanted.
Yet, for all its beauty, the novel was ultimately unsatisfying to me. In part, it was simply its brevity that left me with that feeling. Not only does the book end abruptly — before Changez’s transformation from morally ambiguous Pakistani-American to full-fledged dissenter is fully explored — but also in its final pages it focuses the reader’s attention on the narrative rather than the character. After all, you know the book is ending soon, so you are more interested in finding out what happens than why it happens.
But the biggest disappointment for me was the absence of the texture and complexity that I so liked in Moth Smoke. The American caricatures are underdeveloped and unsubtle — Changez’s employer is Underwood Samson; the lover who first invites and then abandons him is named Erica — and seem more like theatre props than real characters. While the internal conflict within Changez is well described, it is not sufficiently layered — the complexity of emotions in a Pakistani New Yorker in the wake of 9/11 is reduced to a straight battle between concern for the victims and rooting for the Islamic Comeuppance. I could absolutely relate to Changez’s experience, having lived in Britain in the intense year following 9/11, but not so much to his oversimplified feelings. While reading that crucial part of the book, I got the sense I was watching the trailer of an interesting film, not the film itself. Hamid seems to have been so caught up in the politics and symbolism of the story, he forgot he was writing a novel with credible human characters.
But maybe I am overstating the criticism – A Reluctant Fundamentalist is an excellent piece that held my interest throughout, and gently seduced me into reading it in a single sitting. I do wish, however, that Hamid had been less economical with words, more passionate with his characters, and more novelist than political commentator.