New York Times - October 13, 2007 <http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/13/world/europe/13hamid.html?_r=1>
A Pakistani-American Voice in Search of a True Home By JANE PERLEZ
LONDON
WHEN Mohsin Hamid embarked on an 18-city book tour across the United States, he found readers receptive to his latest novel. It is the story of a young Pakistani Princeton graduate who feels empathy with America, but becomes so disillusioned by the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks that he packs up and returns home to the city of Lahore.
The response was so strong that Mr. Hamid, 36, with only one previous novel, sold close to 100,000 copies of "The Reluctant Fundamentalist," enough to propel the book, a work of more literary tone than popular flavor, onto the New York Times best-seller list last spring.
Now Mr. Hamid is the center of literary attention in Britain, where the novel is on the short list for the Man Booker Prize to be announced Tuesday.
But while his novel has received critical acclaim in Britain, home to nearly two million Muslims, the commercial reception has been cooler. In a country where people are worried about what has become known as "the enemy within," sales of a novel that speaks unnervingly to fear and disquiet about Muslims have yet to reach more than several thousand.
To Mr. Hamid, the contrast is telling of the difference between the United States, and its embrace of newcomers, and Europe, particularly Britain, where immigrants can forever, it seems, be made to feel like outsiders.
"Americans are more inclined to think whether you are a Muslim or not, if you speak with an American accent you're an American," Mr. Hamid said over a cup of afternoon tea at his local pub in Notting Hill, where on most occasions he drinks wine.
"In Europe it's more a question of the tribe," he added. "In Europe you can be a second- or third-generation Turkish-German, and there is still a question whether you are European."
Mr. Hamid is well qualified to speak to the differences between the cultures, having spent roughly half his life in the United States. Some of his biography is embedded in his novel's main character, he says, though definitely not the U-turn against America, a country to which he remains sympathetic.
Just a month before Sept. 11, 2001, at age 30, he left New York on a trip to Europe to explore where he belonged, Pakistan or America. Ever since, he has remained based in London, where he works as a part- time brand consultant and is writing another novel. Though he holds a British passport, he says he feels like less than a citizen here.
"I'm a British citizen, yet here they refer to me as a Pakistani novelist," he said. "In America, even though I've never had an American passport, I was called a Pakistani-American."
WHAT makes "The Reluctant Fundamentalist" unusual is the way it takes the reader inside the head of a highly educated Pakistani whose disillusionment makes terrorism alluring, a milder case of the fury among those of Britain's large Pakistani population who have been involved in plots and attacks here.
The story is told as a dramatic monologue with the main character, Changez, talking to an anonymous American in a cafe in Lahore. He recounts moving in contemporary America's business world, falling in love with an Upper East Side, New York, woman (who proves, in the end, to be inaccessible) and, in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, deserting what he had come to cherish.
On the book tour Mr. Hamid was sometimes asked why he had written an anti-American novel. He makes the argument that "The Reluctant Fundamentalist" is actually an American novel, a twist on the classic immigrant tale.
"The traditional immigrant novel is about coming to America," he explained. "I wanted to do the 21st-century polarity when the magnet switches and pushes them away. At its core, this is a story of someone who is in love with America, in love with an American woman, who finds he has to leave. It's a tragic love story. The book doesn't try to say America is bad, it's how someone can be disillusioned with America."
Religion plays little role in the novel. Similarly, in Mr. Hamid's view, religion is not pivotal in the tensions between the United States and the Muslim world. Islamic extremists are not Koranic robots, he said. Rather, "there's a sense of being humiliated and then threatened — that's what makes it insufferable."
Mr. Hamid spent six years in elementary school in Palo Alto, Calif., in the 1980s when his father was studying for his Ph.D. at Stanford. Like his protagonist, Mr. Hamid attended Princeton, and then Harvard Law School. He worked as a consultant in music, television and publishing for McKinsey & Company until 2003, when he began devoting more time to his writing. Two years ago he married Zahra Khan, a television actress.
They travel easily as insider-outsiders in Lahore, the intellectual capital of Pakistan, as well as New York, where Mr. Hamid goes frequently on business, and cosmopolitan London.
So where does Mr. Hamid belong? Does he feel like a Pakistani Muslim or an American?
"I'm fully neither," he said, adding that he believes it is unwarranted to expect individuals to sign up allegiance to a nation- state.
"What I feel like depends on the context you put me in," he said. "In the Pakistani context my attitudes toward religion, to the state, to gender relations are perceptibly American. That makes me American." Yet when he is in the United States he can feel quite Pakistani, he said.
IN the novel Mr. Hamid plays with the notion of the janissary, the Christian boys who were captured by the Ottomans and re-educated as Muslims to become loyal soldiers of the Ottoman army. Changez begins to see himself as a modern-day janissary, the unwitting tool of American globalism.
The notion really took hold when Mr. Hamid heard from his Pakistani friends — architects, Web designers and others — who suffered through the aftermath of Sept. 11 in the United States. Of five "good buddies" from Lahore who went to the United States for college and stayed, all have left, he said.
But slowly, Mr. Hamid sees the wheel turning. On his book tour to places like Dallas, Fort Lauderdale and Minneapolis he found less fear. He was scrutinized less at airport security, a big change from his visits to the United States after Sept. 11, when he was always searched.
"It's not easy to keep the level of fear," he said. "The terrorists, the government, the media worked very hard to keep the American people frightened. I don't think it's all the way there. But a sense of perspective comes from time."
The proof seems to be that Mr. Hamid and his wife are planning to leave London, and after a visit to Lahore, they envision spending a long stretch of time in New York, the place that he says he fell in love with in his 20s, "a place that chooses you like an adult love" and where he does not feel disillusioned.