For some time now, I have been wanting to write about Mohsin Hamid’s new novel, The Reluctant Fundamentalist. I had posted an announcement about the book’s imminent publication, and my inbox had filled up with messages from various folk wondering what exactly I had meant to say about the dilemmas of a Muslim writer in the post-September 11 world. Now, I’ve finished reading the book and I can say that this intelligent novelist is aware of the questions that surround the existence of a Muslim (and not simply a Muslim writer) in a polarized world; the answers he provides are as thoughtful as they are ideological, and they are advanced within the structure of fluid, finely-modulated monologue. The narrator sits across from his American interlocutor in a Lahore cafe: his monologue, delivered in the course of an evening, is the account of a young Pakistani man’s stay in America and his dispirited return home. What gave me special pleasure is that, as in his first novel Moth Smoke, much of the energy in the story comes from the anxieties of a precarious upward mobility. This logic, incidentally, holds better in the realm of love than it does in the arena of geopolitics–or at least it is more readily intelligible as such, and that makes the first half of the new novel more absorbing than the preachier latter half. Nevertheless, as in Moth Smoke, Hamid is not afraid to let tales of love and class play themselves out against a backdrop of nations at war, and what we get is the social drama of Patricia Highsmith mixed with the urgent political ambitions and clarity of a younger, much lamented, Salman Rushdie.

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