Reluctant and Fundamental

9/11 alters immigrant's dream
Sunday, May 6, 2007

Image courtesy of bn.com.

By EVELYN SHIH
STAFF WRITER

Mohsin Hamid's sophomore effort is both an immigrant's success story and the story of September 11. But at the beginning of the book, the immigrant narrative has already ended: The protagonist has returned to his home country, a lapsed emigre, and is relating his tale to a dodgy American tourist in Lahore, Pakistan.

Yet his story within this frame is one of the American dream. Changez rises from relative rags -- his family fortune has fallen from past glory -- to be at the top of the world. He is a Princeton graduate and the most talented fledgling analyst in a selective Manhattan valuation firm, Underwood Samson.

It's his job to tell companies how to "cut the fat." One of Changez's tasks is to evaluate a firm in New Jersey and file a report, possibly firing many employees his father's age. When he expresses discomfort with the idea of judging and showing disrespect to elders, acts counter to his moral education, his friend advises him to "focus on the fundamentals."

Businessmen focusing. Image courtesy of dancepro.co.jp

That phrase, Underwood Samson's ruthless mantra, becomes problematic in the wake of that fateful day when the Manhattan skyline was changed forever -- as was Changez's personal life.

Returning from a business trip to the Philippines after the terrorist attacks, Changez finds that he is no longer "the middle of the color spectrum" in the subway. Instead, he's an instantly feared foreigner. His new secondary citizen status makes him wonder: Are his fundamentals the laws of business that he has learned to wield par excellence; or are they the tenets of Islam and Pakistani culture that he was taught from childhood to revere?

As both his conviction in the American capitalist dream and his passionate love affair unravel, Changez confronts his inner impulse to side with the Third World and reject U.S. imperialism.

Memoirs and novels from the Muslim perspective are hot commodities, and Hamid's novel is the cream of this crop: compelling and meticulously well-written, if not entirely subtle about its message.

Changez is a unique character for standing at the window of opportunity on both sides of the glass, a have-not living among the haves. But what is his ultimate destiny? His decisions, and the ultimate decision of his American guest, are a human drama that will affect the reader no matter which side he or she is on.


Copyright © 2007 North Jersey Media Group Inc.