802 The American Century: Literature since 1945curtain and what lies behind, and the fear, the sense of dread that fissure engenders,
is the closest this story comes to an epiphany: which is, of course, no epiphany at all.
Twilight of the Superheroes ends in paralysis, its protagonists trapped between an
unimagined (because unanticipated) past and an unimaginable (unanticipatable)
future, their emotionally frozen state being a register of a larger, national sense of
losing the plot, being in a strange new world without a map. In this story, the
personal is the political; what happens to characters like Nathaniel and Lucien – and,
on the surface, very little happens – is indelibly linked to what has happened and is
continuing to happen elsewhere – in America, in Europe, and in “the East.”
The personal is equally the political in The Reluctant Fundamentalist. This short
novel is set in Old Anakali, a district of Lahore in Pakistan, on an evening in spring.
A bearded local man introduces himself to a visiting American and proceeds to tell
him what he claims is the story of his life. The author, Mohsin Hamid, has said that
The Reluctant Fundamentalist is “a half-conversation half-story” because the reader
is “asked to provide the other half of the novel’s meaning.” The American never
speaks, we never know his name. Who is he? And what are his reasons for being in
Pakistan? Is he a businessman, a tourist, or (as is occasionally hinted) an agent of
some sorts? There is a curious bulge in the clothes near his shoulder that might be a
gun or, for that matter, might be a security pouch for his valuables. Who is the
bearded man who does all the talking? His speech is almost surrealistically elegant,
as if he were descended from an ancient line of storytellers. For that matter, what are
we to make of all that Changez says? Is he a reliable narrator? Toward the end of his
monologue, Changez observes that the American appears convinced that he is an
“inveterate liar.” Perhaps that conviction helps account for an uneasiness in the
demeanor of the American, which Changez recurrently notes, taking pains to
reassure the American of his good intentions in a tone that does not reassure.
Although this is only a “half-conversation,” a monologue, what we experience has
the quality of a verbal fencing match, as speaker and silent interlocutor seem to
circle around one another in a game that becomes increasingly threatening, full of
dangerous if unfulfilled potential. The indeterminate character of the the threat here
is a vital ingredient in the indeterminacy of the novel. The Reluctant Fundamentalist
thrives on the blurring of boundaries. It is set at a crossroads, a Muslim stronghold
and an agent of American power; Changez himself, so he tells us, has vacillated
between American and Muslim cultures; and the narrative itself situates the reader
at a crossroads – in a border territory where we are required to help draw the map.
Old Anakali, we are told in the course of the story, is a district named after a
courtesan who was imprisoned for loving a prince. And Changez quickly announces
himself as a lover too: “a lover of America.” Born in Pakistan, educated at Princeton
and then recruited by a firm called Underwood Sampson, a ruthless consultancy
firm that does its bit for globalization by facilitating hostile takeovers of businesses
around the world, Changez by his own account refashioned himself as completely
and successfully as James Gatz did when he reinvented himself as Jay Gatsby. But a
turn in this process of reinvention comes with 9/11. Changez is in the Phillippines,
working for Underwood Sampson and attempting as he puts it to be “like anGGray_c05.indd 802ray_c 05 .indd 802 8 8/1/2011 7:31:46 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 46 PM