An Impassioned Warning

...These days, the tendency is manifested in our stated “support” of American troops in Iraq, and the careful tabulations of the American dead, while Iraqi civilians suffer far more numerous casualties...

...Mohsin Hamid is a treasure: a young, gifted novelist who easily bridges two currently antipathetic cultures and is, unlike so many artists, a man of the world with a personal knowledge of the machinations of business and finance—the global empire...

...Even at the height of his obsession, a detached part of him notes the anomaly, the pure arbitrariness of his situation...

...His own Punjabi cultural traditions may have been crumbling, but they were deep nonetheless and he is shocked by how cheaply he held them during his romance with imperial grandeur...

...In 2001, America’s pain was collectively expressed in self-righteous rage...

...I did not know—but that they were scrambling to don the costumes of another era was apparent...

...Solid people, don’t get me wrong...

...How else to explain Changez’ shameful, unedited reaction to the toppling towers...

...As a society, you were unwilling to reflect upon the shared pain that united you with those who attacked you...

...This gives Changez insight into the role he willingly assumed himself in service of American globalism, and the resulting fragmentation of his own soul...

...I had always thought of America as a nation that looked forward,” Changez says...

...He even sees his fellow students, rather improbably, as “philosopher-kings in the making...

...As he says to his listener, we should assume nothing: “You should not imagine that we Pakistanis are all potential terrorists, just as we should not imagine that you Americans are all undercover assassins...

...America, like Erica (for The Reluctant Fundamentalist is an allegory), appears to be retreating into a nostalgia that is almost psychotic in its intensity...

...of safety...

...Changez asks...

...As Changez notices, New York was immediately invaded by the American flag, which sprouted up everywhere in the city practically overnight...

...for the first time I was struck by its determination to look back...

...I felt I was play-acting,” Changez says of this odd double life...

...The scion of an old Lahore family whose fortunes have been on the wane for generations, Changez, like Hamid, attended Princeton University on a scholarship...

...An old Chilean bookseller, the victim of an Underwood Samson client’s takeover bid tells Changez about the janissaries of the Ottoman empire, Christian boys who were captured re-educated as Muslims and established as the elite corps of the Ottoman Army...

...The ideals and assumptions of his own cultural tradition are at war with the absolute allegiance expected of him by the American-dominated global economy, and specifically Underwood Samson, feeding as it does on the failures of the unfortunate...

...What Changez could say, but is too polite to, is that all of these problems have begun to blight America as surely as Pakistan...

...Understanding his role as a janissary allows him to see, with new clarity, how the American empire is hardly very different from the Roman, the Persian, the Turkish, and the British empires that preceded it...

...Upon graduation he is accepted into a still more exclusive club—the management firm of Underwood Samson & Company, where he is employed to evaluate failing businesses that might be ripe for takeover immediately before and after September 11, 2001...

...so does the American response to the attacks...

...once admitted I hired a charioteer who belonged to a serf class lacking the requisite permissions to abide legally and forced therefore to accept work at lower pay...

...The pain might be shared, but human nature seems to make each of us focus on our own pain over everyone else’s...

...I . . . found myself wondering by what quirk of human history my companions—many of whom I would have regarded as upstarts in my own country, so devoid of refinement were they—were in a position to conduct themselves in the world as though they were its ruling class...

...Ultimately he returns to Lahore, disgusted by the historical anomaly that has resulted in the youngest and fittest members of his society—the bright young men going abroad to be educated—leaving the country when war with India seems imminent...

...As Hamid has commented elsewhere, “notions of pride, passion, nostalgia, and envy shape the behavior of countries more than is sometimes acknowledged...

...In less than 200 understated pages, Hamid’s elegant story is told as much through hints and allusions as through ordinary exposition...

...Despicable as it may sound, my initial reaction was to be remarkably pleased,” he declares, though he is no sociopath and not at all indifferent to the suffering of others...

...It leaves space for your thoughts to echo...

...The key words here, I think, are “shared pain...

...And he speaks from first-hand knowledge of our country...

...Their culture and traditions having been erased they had nothing of their own left to fight for and were utterly loyal to their Ottoman masters...

...I like Pakistanis...

...Hamid comes up with a brilliant ending for his book, wrapping up the fear and ambivalence of both sides into one tense moment...

...Using a monologue to present his tale, with Changez addressing the anonymous American as “you,” cleverly enables Hamid to address us, his American readers, directly...

...At f irst he is dazzled by his admittance into the heart of imperial America: “Princeton inspired in me the feeling that my life was a film in which I was the star and everything was possible...

...He grows a beard and turns, at least in appearance, into the very type of Muslim man most fearsome and abhorrent to 21st-century Americans...

...It’s more a novella than a novel,” she says...

...And fundamentalism...

...Changez’ reaction to all this...

...There is much talk about ideals of “honor” and “duty,” which were supposed to have flourished in some American golden age that may or may not have ever existed...

...But the elite has raped that place well and good, right...

...By the time we meet him in Old Anarkali with the American, who might or might not be a CIA agent or a military mercenary, he himself might or might not be a terrorist...

...Not by the skin color or the clothes, he avers, though it is true that “your hair, short-cropped, and your expansive chest—the chest, I would say, of a man who bench-presses regularly, and maxes out well above 225—are typical of a certain type of American...

...His feelings perplex him...

...Later, Changez realizes that he was so easily seduced by the crude attractions of money and status because his sense of self had become very uncertain...

...When he is compelled to listen to observations about Pakistan from a man cocooned in the luxury of a Park Avenue penthouse, Changez becomes aware of his own not-quite-sublimated anger at the “typically American undercurrent of condescension” he sees in the harangue: “Economy’s falling apart, though, no...

...Corruption, dictatorship, the rich living like princes while everyone else suffers...

...Yo u retreated into the myths of your own difference, assumptions of your own superiority...

...I myself was a form of indentured servant whose right to remain was dependent upon the continued benevolence of my employer...

...This marks a stylistic departure from Hamid’s earlier novel, Moth Smoke (2000), where he succumbed to what he himself called “a bacchanalian abandon to its prose...

...of moral certainty...

...One can only hope that we as a nation are not too deeply sunk in our own solipsistic fantasies—or our nostalgia, to take up Hamid’s diagnosis—to understand his impassioned warning that for his sake and our own we must not sink any deeper...

...That last sentence is a nice description for the novella form at its best—and it is indubitably shown at its best here...

...How did I know you were American...

...And you acted out these beliefs on the stage of the world, so that the entire planet was rocked by the repercussions of your tantrums...

...Who knows...

...Yo u guys have got some serious problems with fundamentalism...

...What your fellow countrymen longed for was unclear to me—a time of unquestioned dominance...

...The Reluctant Fundamentalist is a monologue delivered by a bearded Pakistani man, Changez, to a lone American who is seated nervously in Lahore’s Old Anarkali district...

...Of course nothing comes for free in this world, and Changez understands that he is participating in an unspoken bargain: In exchange for his enviable new status as a member of “the officer class of global business,” he and other young people like him from every part of the planet are expected to further the interests of the American empire...

...On Fiction An Impassioned Wa r ni ng By Brooke Allen ONE OF THE CHARACTERS in Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist (Harcourt, 192 pp., $22.00) has just finished writing a piece of fiction...

...CHANGEZ, THEN, is impossibly divided when the events of September 11 disturb his uneasy equilibrium...

...In his diagnosis, she is “disappearing into a powerful nostalgia, one from which only she could choose whether or not to return...

...Erica is haunted by the death of her childhood sweetheart and unable to move ahead into a promising romance with Changez...

...The “partisan and sports-event-like coverage” of the subsequent televised bombing of Afghanistan reminds Changez, as it did me, of the Terminator movies, “but with the roles reversed so that the machines were cast as heroes...

...His ambivalence about America is mirrored in his frustrating love for Erica, a beautiful, privileged New Yorker...

...Since in our digital era spilling words with gross profligacy—in novels, histories, magazines, blogs—is the norm, it is a real pleasure to read a book whose every word is made to count...

...being of a suspect race I was quarantined and subjected to additional inspection...

...Instead, it was your bearing that allowed me to identify you...

...In the International Arrivals Terminal at John F. Kennedy Airport he muses on the obvious similarities: “Armed sentries manned the check post at which I sought entry...