Mohsin Hamid’s new novel is a love story and bildungsroman disguised as a self-help book, and the result has all the inventiveness, exuberance and pathos that the writer’s fans have come to expect. Hamid’s debut novel, Moth Smoke (2000), which wove together a 17th century feudal intrigue with a modern banker’s decadent demise, won critical acclaim, but he made his breakthrough with The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007), about a Princeton-educated Pakistani whose views on Western culture sour after 9/11 and the American who may or may not have been sent to kill him. An international best seller that was short-listed for the Booker Prize, Fundamentalist perfectly captured the post-9/11 tension and paranoia that gripped the U.S. and Pakistan, and it launched Hamid–himself a Princeton-educated Pakistani–into the forefront of contemporary postcolonial writers such as Kiran Desai and Daniyal Mueenuddin.
With How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, Hamid tackles the archetypal rags-to-riches story, adding contemporary sources of stress like religious sectarianism and looming environmental disaster. Whereas traditional get-rich-quick books focus on the acquiring of wealth, Hamid uses the form to explore the moral costs of the single-minded pursuit of money–and how that quest often messes up the successful pursuit of happiness.
The novel is addressed to “you,” a boy whose family moves from a bleak rural village of open sewers and incurable diseases to an unnamed big city that strongly resembles Lahore. Through cheekily imperative chapter titles–“Move to the City,” “Don’t Fall in Love,” “Be Prepared to Use Violence”–we follow the hero on his upward climb from delivery boy of pirated movies to distributor of relabeled expired canned goods to packager of boiled tap water disguised as fancy bottled water. He eventually becomes the water baron of a city whose physical and moral infrastructure is rotten to the core. He marries well and has a child. All the while, he pines for the beautiful girl who comes in and out of his life on her own rise from model to actress to TV hostess to businesswoman.
The great trick of How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia is in how it creates so much empathy for its narrator, who hacks through thickets of bureaucracy, tribalism and religious violence on his resolute quest for lucre. He’s amoral about business, but he cares deeply for his family, as is revealed in beautifully rendered scenes with his less fortunate siblings, parents and Westernized son, his estranged wife and his dream woman. One of Hamid’s most vividly drawn characters is the Lahore-like metropolis, where fundamentalism, hypercapitalism and globalized culture rub up against rampant corruption and extreme poverty. It’s an uneasy city facing an epochal transition: “a rising tide of frustration and anger and violence, born partly of the greater familiarity the poor today have with the rich, their faces pressed to that clear window on wealth now afforded by ubiquitous television, and partly of the change in mentality that results from an outward shift in the supply curve of firearms.”
Hamid keeps the direct second-person address throughout How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, and while it’s nimbly applied, it has its limits. In the latter stages of the book, the hero is described from the point of view of modern surveillance elements such as drones, closed-circuit TVs and hacked personal computers. The conceit is clever and incisive, but it threatens to split open Hamid’s bag of authorial tricks. Having created a certain intimacy with the protagonist, the reader is kept too much at arm’s length. At the end of this marvelous and moving novel, though, Hamid zooms back in on his characters, and this is where he’s at his best–in the emotional trenches.
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