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Mohsin Hamid: The Most Important Novelist Now Writing?

By Jesse Kornbluth
Published: Dec 18, 2018
Category: Fiction

Curtis Sittenfeld was asked: Is there a book you wish you had written? Her reply: “I love Mohsin Hamid’s novels — “The Reluctant Fundamentalist,” “How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia” and “Exit West” — because they’re so smart and funny and earthy and warm, and I’m incredibly impressed by how tightly written they are. They’re all in the range of 200 pages. I aspire to write a novel that’s that short yet also feels like it’s exactly the length it should be instead of feeling incomplete.”

I agree. I thought that last year when I praised Exit West. This year I’ll go further: I think Mohsin Hamid is the best — that is, the most relevant — novelist now writing. For me, the best novel of 2017 is the best novel of 2018.

First, because Hamid understands that we live in a time of shortened attention spans, he writes short novels.

Second, because his writing, which is often in the second person, is so intimate that you are tempted to think he has read your mind.

Finally, because in book after book, he writes about the most urgent issue of our time.

Refugees.

That is, us.

You’re not a refugee?

Think again.

As the simplest level, in “How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia,” he writes: “We are all refugees from our childhoods.”

Indeed, that’s the story line of “Filthy Rich.” A poor boy from the country is taken to the city, and he makes his way…

But no city is secure. In ”Exit West,” he writes:

“It might seem odd that in cities teetering at the edge of the abyss young people still go to class — in this case an evening class on corporate identity and product branding — but that is the way of things, with cities as with life, for one moment we are pottering about our errands as usual and the next we are dying, and our eternally impending ending does not put a stop to our transient beginnings and middles until the instant when it does.”

Things change. Fast. A hurricane sends Puerto Ricans migrating to Florida. A fire burns California in a way that doesn’t encourage rebuilding. Your job disappears, and there’s not another in your county. The President makes your health insurance spike, and you start thinking seriously about Sweden. And wars have put 60 million on the move.

“People who move,” Hamid told Seth Meyers, “are just like us.”

He believes massive migration is inevitable: “People are going to move. They always have.”

But in every country, we see a patriarchy that resists movement — that is, immigrants. These men believe that the solution to their problems is keeping other people from moving in or driving their undesirable neighbors out. There’s a lot of writing that deals with this issue. You’ve seen it. You’re bored with it.

You won’t be bored with “How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia.” It starts like a self-help book. (To read most of the first chapter, click here.) But the boy from the country grows up fast, and the lessons he learns aren’t ones you read in self-help books. (“At each subsequent wonder you think you have arrived, that surely nothing could belong more to your destination than this, and each time you are proven wrong until you cease thinking and simply surrender to the layers of marvels and visions washing over you.”)

Hamid says he writes love stories. Yes, but not like any you’ve read. In “Filthy Rich,” the narrator’s childhood lover makes her escape, becomes a star. He also ascends, and, years later, they reconnect. And then, decades later… I know: I could be more specific. But if I were, I’d be serving up spoilers. [To buy the paperback of “How to Get Rich in Rising Asia” from Amazon, click here. To buy the Kindle edition — for a mere $1.99 — click here.]

“The Reluctant Fundamentalist” is a 184-page monologue. A man from Pakistan tells an American dinner companion the story of his life. (To read an excerpt from the first chapter, click here.) He went to Princeton. Met a beautiful classmate on a trip. Got a job as a consultant. (Hamid graduated from Princeton and Harvard Law and worked as a consultant.) There’s a complicated romance. Great success. And then… 9/11. He sees America with fresh eyes:

“As a society, you were unwilling to reflect upon the shared pain that united you with those who attacked you. You retreated into myths of your own difference, assumptions of your own superiority. 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, not least my family, now facing war thousands of miles away.”

“It seemed to me then — and to be honest, sir, seems to me still — that America was engaged only in posturing. As a society, you were unwilling to reflect upon the shared pain that united you with those who attacked you. You retreated into myths of your own difference, assumptions of your own superiority… Such an America had to be stopped in the interests not only in the rest of humanity, but also in your own.”

Where is this going? How did a dinner conversation turn into… a thriller? And, on the last page, what happens? [To buy the paperback of “The Reluctant Fundamentalist” from Amazon, click here. For the Kindle edition, click here.]

Sometimes great books make good movies.

But start with the books. You’ll thank me. And when you push them on your friends, they’ll thank you.