>>REVIEWS
THE RELUCTANT FUNDAMENTALIST
Mohsin Hamid
Bond Street Books, 192 pp.
THE BEAUTIFUL THINGS THAT HEAVEN BEARS
Dinaw Mengestu
Riverhead, 240 pp.
Written as a first-person narrative – a monologue, basically – The Reluctant Fundamentalist is the story of Changez, a young man from Pakistan who wins a scholarship to Princeton. When he graduates, he lands a job with a prestigious valuation firm and quickly emerges as the top new hire, becoming the CEO’s golden boy. He falls in love with an American, a deeply troubled, Ivy League-educated, upper class, aspiring novelist named Erica and quickly becomes a member of New York’s upwardly mobile Wall Street elite.
The life that Changez is building starts to unravel when he takes a business trip to the Philippines. One night after work, he returns to his hotel room, switches on the TV and sees the images of 9/11. As he watches the collapsing Twin Towers, he smiles.
This is the point when a lesser writer would alienate his readers, but Hamid somehow makes Changez relatable even as he begins to repudiate his American lifestyle, moving back to Pakistan, becoming a professor and eventually becoming a fundamentalist.
Hamid makes comments on major political and social issues from a unique viewpoint, as an American-educated, highly successful Muslim man living and working in New York after 9/11. Throughout the novel, we see Changez transform from a brilliant and hard-working immigrant living the American Dream to an increasingly anti-American fundamentalist.
The story itself is not complex – the entire plot is made blatantly clear in the first ten pages of the book – but it is perfectly crafted. The prose is clear and concise. The story is riveting and draws you in quickly, with an unhurried and confident style. While the novel can be classified as literature, somehow Hamid makes the book as compelling as a spy thriller.
There are autobiographical aspects to the story. Hamid is Pakistani, attended Princeton and Harvard and worked for several years in New York as a management consultant. Drawing from these experiences gives the story depth. In a similar vein, Dinaw Mengestu uses his history as an Ethiopian immigrant in his debut novel, The Beautiful Things that Heaven Bears.
Mengestu came to the U.S. in 1980, joining his father who fled Ethiopia in 1978 during the Red Terror. Like Hamid, he makes comments on sociopolitical issues, but from a vastly different perspective.
The novel follows Sepha Stephanos, an Ethiopian convenience store owner in a poor, predominantly black neighbourhood in Washington, D.C. Sepha spends his days at the counter of his failing business, no longer expecting much from his life in America, whiling away his evenings with his friends Kenneth, a civil engineer from Kenya, and Joseph, a waiter from the Congo.
Sepha begins a relationship with a white, former professor named Judith who has recently moved in next door. Unfortunately, vandalism aimed at Judith and her biracial daughter, Naomi, forces them to leave the neighbourhood, and Sepha’s dreams of a more fulfilling life fade, leaving him in a self-reflective purgatory. (The title of the novel comes from the last lines of Dante’s Inferno, where the poet, emerging from hell, catches a glimpse of heaven before entering purgatory.)
The story is sad, but Mengestu’s clear, tightly-woven language betrays no self-pity and his tone is very matter-of-fact. Sepha has only a slightly detached, reflective quality that is the result of struggling to make a life in an adopted country.
Both Mengestu and Hamid tell stories of immigrants coming to terms with the realities of the American Dream. Indeed, one of the great features of immigrant literature in recent years is the way a writer can sharply depict characters caught on the seams between two worlds – rich/poor, non-white/white, citizen/foreigner – and expose readers to issues, from 9/11 and terrorism to immigration and poverty, from unique and insightful perspectives. |
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