“The Reluctant Fundamentalist” by Mohsin Hamid

Year of publication: 2007
Genre: novel
Setting and Time: New York, Pakistan, Greece and Chile, 2001
Themes: fundamentalism, politics, life, America, love, immigrant experience

Shortlisted for the Booker prize 2007

About the author: Mohsin Hamid was born in Pakistan in 1971, but he spent part of his childhood in the United States where his father was enrolled in a PhD programme. He then went back to Pakistan but had his education in the United States (Princeton and Harvard Law School). He worked as a management consultant in the USA and then as a freelance journalist in Lahore. His first novel, Moth Smoke, was published in 2000 and was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. The Reluctant Fundamentalist is his second novel to date.

Plot: Changez, a Pakistani man who from a once wealthy family in Lahore, experiences his own version of the American Dream when his talent and his Princeton scholarship lead him to a well-paid job in the world of New York finance and to a relationship with Erica, a beautiful American girl. Changez relates in a conservation with an American traveller in Lahore how he never felt entirely at ease in America and how the attacks on the World Trade Centre and the subsequent repercussions - both political and personal - roused him from his American Dream.

Some thoughts: The Pakistani narrator, Changez, invites an American man to have dinner with him in Lahore. He begins to tell his story, which begins a few months before 9/11 and ends a few months after the tragedy of the Twin Towers. It is more a monologue than a conversation between Changez and the unnamed American man who never utters a word. Honestly, I did not really understand this expedient, apart from the fact that it serves the purpose by the end of the book and The New York Times says that it gives the tale “an Arabian-nights urgency” which is quite appropriate (the end of the story may mean the death of the teller). I was also wondering if the title is ironic or not, because the main character cannot be exactly called fundamentalist, and certainly not a reluctant one, either. Karen Olsson, always from The New York Times, puts it in this way: “It seems that Hamid would have us understand the novel’s title ironically. We are prodded to question whether every critic of America in a Muslim country should be labeled a fundamentalist, or whether the term more accurately describes the capitalists of the American upper class. Yet these queries seem blunter and less interesting than the novel itself, in which the fundamentalist, and potential assassin, may be sitting on either side of the table.” Mmmmmh, mumble mumble…
This is mostly a novel about the enchantment and disillusionment of expatriates with America. I particularly liked the reference to the janissaries of the Ottoman empire, who were trained to fight against their own people. Changez feels like one of them, working for a country that “hates” Muslims, or Arabs as they say in America (he’s not one of them, but they don’t know!). After 9/11, America became more suspicious of every Muslim person and invaded what Changez had always considered a friend country of Pakistan, Afghanistan.
Hamid, who was also educated at Princeton and worked in the finance business, seems to share Changez’s sudden hate for America, their way of life and its change after 9/11. While I can understand Changez’s political motivations for leaving America, I don’t understand the need to put a love story in the novel: it only confuses the reader. Did Changez leave America also because he was let down by his relationship with Erica? I read in a review from The Guardian that the love story might be a metaphor for America (Am-Erica) that doesn’t want to change (Change-z) and leave behind its European (Chris-tian) past. Uh? Ok, I didn’t get it, I’m sorry. Now I know, but I’m not thrilled by the news.
What keeps you reading, however, is a buzzing question in you head: why did Changez become a “fundamentalist” and why did he grow a beard and left his privileged job in Manhattan in order to return to Pakistan? You will never get a clear-cut answer. This is an open ending, like it or not.
In conclusion, I liked the novel but I was a bit confused at the end. I will wait for Hamid’s next work to see if his writing improves.