The Reluctant Fundamentalist
by Mohsin Hamid
This novel falls with a thump into the category called “post-September-11th” books, and it is not subtle in what it tries to do. There is cleverness and skill in the form, an extended first-person monologue delivered by a Pakistani man, Changez, who has come across an American in Lahore and seems desperate to tell his story to the stranger, over one long evening: Changez came to the U.S. as a modest but ambitious teenager to attend Princeton University, and proceeded to live a kind of immigrant dream. He graduates at the top of his class and is hired by an exclusive, high-paying financial evaluation firm, which prizes his ability to “focus on the fundamentals.” His gradual disillusionment with that job is just one small theme referenced by the title of the book; his growing disillusionment with the United States itself gives the words “reluctant fundamentalist” a teasing edge that adds to the tension in the second half of the novel. Did refined, Americanized Changez, who can't quite say why he found himself smiling at the television image of the World Trade Center towers tumbling down, eventually become some kind of Islamic fundamentalist in Pakistan? A terrorist?
That rather sudden transition—the September attacks come at the midpoint of the book—from a man in love with both New York and a troubled, wealthy young American woman he has met, to the cynical ranter he reveals himself to be as the book progresses, is unnaturally sudden. And Hamid seems to feel that the criticisms Changez lodges against the United States are more shocking than they are. (Who hasn’t wanted to see American ambition knocked down a few satisfying pegs?) A larger failure in Hamid’s argument is that, despite the title, there is almost no mention of religion, which is truly at the center of most of the debates and events Changez seems so breezily judgmental about. That said, the book doesn’t fail to stir the issues in the reader’s mind, and more to the point, the ending of this short, swift novel is sound and satisfying. - GilliganLabels: Books
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