Anna Leach
posted 16 October 2007

Tracking a young Pakistani’s disillusionment with American dream, the premise and title of The Reluctant Fundamentalist sounds off-puttingly like a worthy broadsheet news-feature. But contemporary and current-affairish as this book is, Mohsin Hamid lifts a beautiful, delicate and compelling pearl of a narrative out of the stale, raked-over material about America and its critics that newspapers have gorged on since 9/11.

Told in the voice of the main character, Changez, the story follows his meteoric success in America: Princeton, progression to a job as financial analyst in an elite New York firm and love affair with a beautiful American girl. And then the shift in events, personal and international that lead to his return to Pakistan.

Changez, older, bearded, sits in a café in Lahore, Pakistan, and tells his story to an unknown and inaudible American interlocutor, interjecting his account with comments and responses to this stranger he eats dinner with. The elegant mannered English of a high-class Pakistani frames the straight-spoken pared down American English of the narrative episodes. And the easy raconteur story-telling sits amidst the awkward conversational interludes. The most striking feature of the novel is the voice – intimate and intense addressed to the ‘you’ that is partly the invisible inaudible American interlocutor and partly the reader, bringing the story close and uncomfortable – an important effect, given the story of the foreign radical is one we have externalised, and intentionally see as far away and separate from us.

What really sets this novel above other material on America is the tone of it – which far from being angry or boring – has a fragile and almost fairytale quality. Discussions about ‘fundamentalism’ in the West today are too often monopolised by depersonalised government language that presents death as ‘collateral damage’, and are easy prey to the hysteria of mass media who peddle terror and paranoia.

The depersonalisation and hysteria that characterise current public discourse exercise their pull over this fragile individual narrative. But in The Reluctant Fundamentalist, depersonalisation is elevated to a strange existential hollowness, delicately reminiscent of Camus or Fitzgerald as the blurb claims; while paranoia transforms into a thrilling narrative urgency, an undertow of threat and impending disaster that teases the reader on.

Hamid redeems a plot that could be a political documentary synopsis, taking it compassionately and beautifully into the realm of literature, affording us a richer, wiser and more permanent view of one of our decade’s quintessential stories.