The book makes use of the second person throughout, which recalls Hamid’s earlier book, The Reluctant Fundamentalist. I find that one of the most compelling stylistic elements of both texts, and I see a fair deal of nuance in how that use of second person is deployed. In Hamid’s sophomore novel, the use of “you” places the reader in the role of American interlocutor with a potential terrorist; the politics and the reader’s ambiguous affect are fascinating to me and what lingered with me. Here, the use of “you” is less profound, but still interesting in its usage, oscillating between a prescriptive mode and an immersive one. The prescriptive mode tells you how to become rich and the immersive one tells you your life story. Ultimately, the ending of the book has some meditations on what it means for a writer and a reader to be in communion: “I too contain you, who may not yet even be born, you inside me inside you [...] and so may you, may I, may we, so may all of us confront the end” (222). Admittedly, the ending fails to land with the same force of Hamid’s previous novel, but it still felt narratively satisfying.
To take a step back, the book recounts how you grew up, how you worked as a delivery boy for a film bootlegger, how you met a pretty girl, how your parents passed away, how the pretty girl moved away, how you married someone else, how you started some shady business dealings, how you were under attack, how you lost your business, and how you passed away. Due to the structure of the novel, each chapter reads like a vignette or short story. This allows Hamid to really focus on a few key moments in your life.
The approach has some advantages and some drawbacks. One advantage is that the book never feels like it overstays its welcome and another is that it allows Hamid to go through a variety of moods to great effect. There are tender moments, hopeful moments, and dark, tense moments that stand out beautifully against the others. The drawbacks are that your characterization is somewhat lacking and that there are some moments that are dropped or underdeveloped.
I’d like to start with one of the moments that really impressed me. About a fourth of the way through the novel, your mother is diagnosed with cancer. When the doctor calls for someone to explain the diagnosis, you are chosen because you are the most educated family member. So you go in to serve the family. It’s a gut-wrenching scene. Your mother keeps asking about the practical concerns: how much will the treatment cost? (It’s more than your father’s annual salary.) Your mother then asks what will happen without the treatment. (Death.) You watch while your mother considers her options. You have to negotiate what to do: surgery, radiotherapy, hormones, and so on. The staging of the scene with you in the middle evokes so much sympathy for the novel’s central character and then it gets even more powerful: you explain everything to your family. Then, “Your father looks at you repeatedly, and each time you nod. He is tearfully grateful to the matriarch for agreeing to pay for the surgery. He smiles and blinks and shifts his weight. [...] You have not seen him in the presence of one of his employers since you were a child. To observe him like this disturbs you” (65). Meanwhile, your other “has until now utterly refused to believe that she will not soon return to health” (65). It’s a complicated dynamic. Your mother, knowing she will die, agrees to something for the benefit of your father, who does not have the capacity to pay for what is ultimately a favour to him. The scene has a rich bittersweet tone that really demonstrates Hamid’s prowess as an author.
By contrast, Hamid is able to ramp up the tension in other scenes. In one, you are involved in a strange criminal enterprise. You bring an idea to your armed boss that would increase profits, but he is skeptical of you (rightly so: your money-making method is to buy expired goods, remove their expiration dates and replace them with consumer-friendly ones). The conversation teeters on the brink of an outright conflict, but instead it simmers beautifully. Later, your life is under threat and a murder takes place to protect you. Later, a boutique is subject to a heist, resulting in the death of another character following being hit with the butt of a rifle.
Between these moments is a wistful thread where you are pursuing a pretty girl from your village. She gets a fair amount of narration, as well, and her backstory is compelling, though palpably male-drafted. Essentially, she is looking for a new life and resorts to sex work in the hopes of becoming a model. She is ultimately successful, becoming a model and an actress before becoming a furniture dealer. There are tender moments between you and this girl. It’s perhaps true to life that she appears in infrequent blips throughout your life before the two of you ultimately form a partnership, but the lack of development both romanticizes the relationship while also feeling somewhat underdeveloped. I suppose the storyline follows the first rule of show business: “always leave them wanting more.”
All this to say, the variety of moods throughout the novel make it engaging to me even in moments where the story dips. Unsurprisingly, the moments of ambiguity are still what most grip me. Hamid makes reference to various organizations that are supportive to you—-because it’s unclear in which country, exactly, this story takes place, it makes it hard to determine. I somewhat suspect that the shadowy organization of which you are a part is a communist group, but I can’t say for sure. Then, the shadowy politics of a government contract for water permeates throughout, but it’s always unclear exactly how you fit into a grand scheme. The penultimate chapter refers to the narrator’s sneakiness: “I suppose I should consider at this stage confessing to certain false pretenses, to certain subterfuges that may have been perpetrated here, certain of-hands that may have been, um sleighted” (197). It’s an intriguing line because it does not feel, entirely, that the hand has been shown. The book feels like one where the more you examine it, the more the mystery will deepen, and I really appreciate that about it.
Hamid’s humour is also a nice touch and, while sometimes on the nose, I appreciate his insights into the reader-author relationship. While this book pretends to be self-help, Hamid comments on the distinction between genres pretty early in the text to mitigate the imagined critique. He writes that, “It’s remarkable how many books fall into the category of self-help” (19). He elaborates, “Why, for example, do you persist in reading that much-praised, breathtakingly boring foreign novel, slogging through page after page after please-make-it-stop page of tar-slow prose and blush-inducing formal conceit, if not out of an impulse to understand distant lands that because of globalization are increasingly affecting life in your own? What is this impulse of yours, at its core, if not a desire for self-help?” (19). Hamid frames the novel here in a self-referential wink but one that appeals to the political backdrop for the production of the novel. In considering novels as a form of self-help, Hamid then says “At the very least they help you pass the time, and time is the stuff of which a self is made” (19)---and I quite like that idea of identity. In deconstructing the genre, the narrator says “all books, each and every book ever written, could be said to be offered to the reader as a form of self-help” (20). So, here we have a book that offers self-help, even if that self is the author, the narrator, the reader, or an amalgam of each.
Reading the book in a diasporic context gives the telling of a self-help story an additional dimension. Towards the end of the book, the narrator admits that it has been pretty useless as a money-making venture. Instead, the book becomes a project of introspection and broader social considerations. All things considered, the novel’s main character is full of regrets or paths that never materialized, and as the end approaches the melancholia of the book becomes all the more evident. In some ways, it reads like Proust’s In Search of Lost Time.
I leave one representative quotation from the novel that I think encapsulates the ‘vibe’ of the novel and its ultimate purpose:
“We are all refugees from our childhoods. And so we turn, among other things, to stories. To write a story, to read a story, is to be a refugee from the state of refugees. Writers and readers seek a solution to the problem that time passes, that those who have gone are gone and those who will go, which is to say every one of us, will go. For there was a moment when anything was possible. And there will be a moment when nothing is possible. But in between we can create” (213).
In between we can create.
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