Pakistan to Princeton: Review of Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist
Sunday Times of India, March 11, 2007

A few years ago, when I was staying in a friend's barsati in Delhi's Defence Colony, my host came home one evening with a painting. The canvas showed a work done in Kalighat style, but the subject was modern. It showed a bhadralok couple sitting together, drinking tea; behind them, on a table with a blue tablecloth, stood a big television set showing the World Trade Center. Smoke was coming out from one of the towers. On the edge of the screen, on the right, another plane was visible in the sky.

The image spoke to me. The artist's name was Kalam Patua, and I can only guess at his intentions for doing the painting. But what his remarkable work communicated to me was the complexity of a world in which disaster gets consumed as easily as a cup of tea. And that wasn't all. I was also drawn to the intact world of the Indian middle-class, to the fact that it was in touch with the daily life of the planet but not necessarily in a way that disturbed its inertia.

How to write about the events of September 11 in a way that, as in Patua's art, they appear as if occurring at a distance? When I was writing my novel "Home Products," I imagined a scene during which a marriage is being negotiated in Patna while the news on the television is all about the attacks on the Twin Towers. The following day, the protagonist of my novel goes to his aunt's house. Everyone is watching CNN. In between her comments about the deaths of innocent people, the aunt asks my protagonist, "My dear, will you eat fish?"

In the years that have passed since the events of September 11, the Twin Towers have gone up in flames again and again in a slew of well-regarded works of fiction. Here's a small sampling: Jonathan Safran Foer, "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close"; Ian McEwan, "Saturday"; John Updike, "Terrorist"; Claire Messud, "The Emperor's Children"; Jay McInerney, "The Good Life." But these, arguably, are voices from the inside.

On the outside, stand all sorts of others, witnesses, allies, critics, enemies, and many more whose homes go up in flames every time tragedies erupt in faraway places. Who is writing about them?
In his new novel "The Reluctant Fundamentalist," the Pakistani writer Mohsin Hamid has confronted the events of September 11 directly, asking whether the victims were only those who perished under the collapsing towers.

In Hamid's novel, a young man from Lahore comes to America to get an education at Princeton; later, he finds work in an elite corporate firm in New York City, and then, after the attacks, he experiences a level of pain and estrangement that compels him to go back to Pakistan.

The entire novel is the account of a single evening as the young man, whose name is Changez, recounts to a silent American visitor the story of his stay in America and his dispirited return home. Part-thriller, part-testimonial, the book is very much a riposte to the West's vilification of Islam and Muslims. But it is also more than that. In fact, as in his well-received first novel "Moth Smoke," much of the energy in the story comes from the anxieties of precarious upward mobility.
Changez is from a family with feudal trappings but no real wealth other than an appreciation of etiquette. His place in Princeton and later in corporate America is marked by self-doubt. A woman that he falls in love with, Erica, is from a wealthy family. Erica, like the America of which she is quite literally a part, represents the allure of a more desirable future that is always threatened by loss. This anxiety breeds resentment and confusion. Describing why he smiled when the towers fell, Changez says, "When I am approached for a donation to charity, I tend to be forthcoming, at least insofar as my modest means will permit. So when I tell you I was pleased at the slaughter of thousands of innocents, I do so with a profound sense of perplexity."

The triangulation of desire and resentment holds better in the realm of love, however, than it does in the arena of geopolitics—or at least it is more readily intelligible as such in the novel, and that makes the first half of the new novel more absorbing than the preachier latter half. Still, as in "Moth Smoke," Hamid is not afraid to let tales of love and class play themselves out against a backdrop of nations at war, and what we get is the social drama of Patricia Highsmith mixed with the urgent political ambitions and clarity of a younger, much lamented, Salman Rushdie.

Amitava Kumar teaches English at Vassar College. His novel "Home Products" is being published this month by Picador.