Mohsin Hamid has a new novel coming out. I learned about it this morning via Manish, who is the Knight Harbinger of all that is new in the world. I want to read Mohsin Hamid’s book to see what he’s got over John Updike and Martin Amis. Manish’s post has earned a comment from Amardeep who writes: ‘I want to write a novel called “Just an Average Muslim Bloke Driving a Toyota Camry to Work, and Hanging Out Around the Office Cooler.” No terrorism, no fundamentalism. Just maybe a girlfriend, a boring job, and a slight drinking problem he needs to get over.’ Good point. And yet. And yet… A short-story version of this dream exists in the opening paragraphs of Hanif Kureishi’s “My Son the Fanatic.” But fundamentalism comes looking for the protagonist, Pervez. Do you know what would be more boring, and indeed more brutal, than having to confront a Muslim writer addressing fundamentalism once again? To be that Muslim writer faced with the choice of having to face on the page, yet again, the familiar, tiresome questions that people like customs officers ask him or her, and to want, at the same time, as an artist, to free each word on the page from the inevitable politics that that has on its breath the smell “like dead snakes kept too long in a jar.”

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