And I really did enjoy it. It was compelling and exciting and charming and engrossing. I'd even recommend it to others. I read it quickly, in gulps, even though I rarely finish most books.
But I don't think that it's a great or brilliant book. It is entertaining, but didn't move me or shake me to my core.
The Reluctant Fundamentalist reminded me a lot of Yann Martel's Life of Pi. It's a story recounted by a brown, male main character. It starts with a basic tease to the reader (The Reluctant Fundamentalist, through its title, implicitly promises that its story will help you understand the mind of a fundamentalist; Life of Pi's narrator tells you that his story will make you believe in God). Both stories are loaded down with layers of symbolism and seem like parables or allegories pointing you to some larger truth. (Interestingly, Life of Pi won the Booker prize in 2002 and The Reluctant Fundamentalist was shortlisted in 2007 - maybe there's some formula here for how to get on the Booker shortlist?).
Mohsin Hamid's novel is very explicitly a "post-9/11" story, and seems interested in answering the question so many Americans appeared to have had in the years following the World Trade Center attack - "why do they hate us?" It's a story told by a Pakistani man named Changez in a cafe in Lahore - a first person narrative, where the main character slowly explains his origin story, like Samuel L. Jackson in that movie directed by another brown guy, Unbreakable.
Changez tells an American stranger how he moved from Pakistan to America to go to school at Princeton, moved to New York to work at the prestigious and cleverly named firm of Underwood Samson, and fell in love with an American woman. His story is about his love affair with America and what happened to that love in the wake of September 11th.
But the really shocking thing about this book is that it is called The Reluctant Fundamentalist and religious faith plays no role in it at all. It allows the reader to understand the mind of a Pakistani man who develops complicated feelings about America, but it does so without forcing the secular Western reader to confront and consider the uncomfortable question of religious belief and submission to religious law. How many Booker prize judges are deeply religious, I wonder? How many "foreign" writers celebrated by the Western literary establishment are? Are any?
The Seattle Times wrote in its review that "by mid-book, readers understand Changez's anger, even if they don't agree with it....." But that's exactly the problem with this book! It makes the foreign and menacing totally understandable and sympathetic.
In 1994, Hanif Kureshi published a short story in the New Yorker called "My Son the Fanatic." The story is based in London, I think, and follows a Pakistani cab driver as he tries to hold on to his increasingly religious son. God, that was a great story. A pre-9/11 story that sheds light on 9/11!
The story was so shocking and haunting because the kind, non-religious father just couldn't understand the recent evolution of his son, no matter how hard he tried and how open-minded he attempted to be. His lack of religious faith or experience seemed to make genuine dialogue impossible. In the end though, disturbingly, the son may have more insight into the father than the father would like to admit. And the sympathetic, secular father may not be so completely sympathetic precisely because of his lack of unshakable religious conviction.
I'd nominate Kureshi's as the great post-9/11 story of our times. It is insightful, disturbing, and grapples with some really tough issues. Like the difficulty (impossibility?) of resolving the conflict between those who's world is based on reason and those who's world is based on revelation.
I think that I understand why The Reluctant Fundamentalist was so highly praised. It's an excellent book. I just wanted more from it than it could give me.
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