The Book Review of “The Reluctant Fundamentalist”

Two Extremist Binarism

The Book Review of “The Reluctant Fundamentalist”

By Mubarak Ali Lashari

The Book ‘The Reluctant Fundamentalist’; Written by Mohsin Hamid, Published By Oxford University Press, Pages 111, ISBN 0978-0-19-547517-3.

The novel consists of 12 chapters in all, dealing with the story of a Muslim antagonist from Lahore Pakistan, who is infatuated by the American citizen, girl friend Erica. It is Mohsin Hamid’s second navel after seven years of the first one ‘Moth Smoke’ in 2000. The novel is entwined with the first person narrative throughout and seemingly in essay type description with a long monologue of the character Changez. The story of the novel revolves around the concept of fundamentalism in behaviors of the West i.e. America. the antagonist considers it as the repulsive to be there after the Afghan attack of USA which is his immediate closer, geographically, socially, religiously and faith, which shocks him to know the American attitude as fundamentalist. In his own words: “I had always thought of America as a nation that looked forward; for the first time I was struck by its determination to look back. Living in New York was like living in a film about the Second World War;..”

This alienation continues to his thinking as other than American recalling the interference of American government of the Third World Asian countries like Vietnam, Korea, the straits of Taiwan, the Middle East, and now Afghanistan. His working at the American valuation firm, which is working for restoring ailing companies, Underwood Samson, he considers himself as one of the janissaries of the Ottoman Empire were captured Christian boys trained to fight against their own people, which they did with singular ferocity. This interesting class of warrior is described during a business lunch to Changez, the young hero of Mohsin Hamid's second novel, at a moment of crisis over his own identity. Born in Pakistan, educated at Princeton and currently the hottest new employee at a New York firm specialising in ruthless appraisals of ailing companies being targeted for takeover, Changez recognises himself in the description. "I was a modern-day janissary," he observes, "a servant of the American empire at a time when it was invading a country with a kinship to mine ..."

We further notice thin-blood cultural aspiration especially in the relationship between Changez and Erica. This privileged, patrician girl has a tragedy in her past: a childhood sweetheart named Chris, who died in his teens. Her growing intimacy with Changez, while interestingly free of the racial tensions that traditionally afflict such couples in literature, is nevertheless thwarted by her inability to forget Chris or allow Changez to take his place. In the turbulence following September 11, this preoccupation with her own past becomes a crippling obsession - "she was disappearing into a powerful nostalgia" - resulting in a breakdown, hospitalisation and probable suicide. It all feels a little sketchy, psychologically: simultaneously over the top and undersubstantiated. But after a while you realise you're not in the realm of psychology at all, but of allegory (and if you don't, a nudge or two from the narrator - "it seemed to me that America, too, was increasingly giving itself over to a dangerous nostalgia" - soon sets you straight). It dawns on you that Erica is America (Am-Erica) and that Chris's name has been chosen to represent the nation's fraught relationship with its moment of European discovery and conquest, while the narrator himself stands for the country's consequent inability to accept, uh, changez.

The book has good qualities to describe cultural tendencies as well as ideological attachment towards the home town, country as well counting its obsession with the physical attachment and loosing of Erica. The interpretative way of the novel is a long monologue which sometimes feels boring and unnatural and overemphasised. Yet to know the Western fundamentalist behavor towards the east the novel presents the good example to go through the details of mentalities and understanding.