How wrong you can be about an author’s intentions, about the scope of his or her ambitions. When you encounter a book titled How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia,you might assume it’s one of those you-too-can-climb-the-ladder-to-glorious-capitalist-success books that sell like bottled water. Then you notice that it is a novel by Mohsin Hamid, a 30-something Pakistani educated at Princeton and Harvard, whose previous work, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. 

You loved that novel, a first-person narration by a young man with a résumé much like Hamid’s who struggles to reconcile East and West. From reading that book, you know that Hamid is a master ironist, so you think that this new book is a parody of business self-help books, with sharply satiric observations about the ways in which entrepreneurs in emerging economies are parroting the amoral behaviors of first-world moneymen, wreaking havoc on culture and the environment in the process.  

But after the first pages, in which the narrator addresses “you” directly, purporting to announce his “objective,” you suspect you’ve entered the world of metafiction and are reminded of Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler, a novel wherein the author is himself a character, instructing (often unreliably) the reader on how to read and understand the book. You believe that Hamid, like Calvino, is just offering you a meditation on the process of writing and reading, and that rather than bothering to develop rounded characters, he will give you stick figures meant to illustrate philosophical and artistic notions. 

Hamid seems to confirm this suspicion at the start of Chapter 2, which he titles Get an Education: “And what of other novels, those which for reasons of plot or language or wisdom or frequent gratuitous and graphic sex you actually enjoy and read with delighted hunger? Surely those are versions of self-help. At the very least they help you pass the time, and time is the stuff of which a self is made.” Now you are sure that while Hamid is all about messing with your head, he cares little for tugging at your heart. 

However, you are further thrown when the protagonist, who Hamid also calls “you,” is, despite the absence of a name or identified origin, a wonderfully particularized person, a bright and enterprising child born in a dirt-poor village, whose family moves to a burgeoning and chaotic third-world city when he is very young. This “you,” though demonstrably loyal to his family, is driven to transcend his circumstances by getting an education and making money. 

You follow “you” for seven decades, from overcrowded classrooms and a flirtation with extremism through apprenticeship in business and initial financial failures to wealth and power, all while “you” is caring for dying parents and longing for the young woman (also nameless and whom we know as “the pretty girl”) that “you” loves but loses because she wants a better life in another city. “You” settles for an arranged marriage, has a beloved child who turns out to be very different than “you” and achieves the status so assiduously sought. You find yourself deeply involved with this life, so that when “you” hits the wall, losing much of what has been acquired, you are moved. And when, in the last stages of life, “you” gains a measure of serenity and wisdom, you have tears in your eyes and know that Hamid’s novel has done that which few novels are capable of : It has deepened feeling and provoked questions about the meaning of your own world.  

The above paragraphs feebly imitate the second-person narration Hamid employs; with an ordinary writer, it seems a novelty, mere technique. Yet in Hamid’s supple hands, the second person is honed into a fine instrument for combining incisive social commentary, artistic experimentation and gripping storytelling. At the start of the final chapter, the narrator (this time, more accurately) says: “This book, I must now concede, may not have been the best of guides to getting filthy rich in rising Asia. An apology is no doubt due. But at this late juncture, apologies alone can achieve little. Far more useful, I propose, to address ourselves to our inevitable exit strategies, yours and mine, preparation, in this lifelong case, being most of the battle.” And on the powerfully poetic concluding page, Hamid sums up the human condition.

I think, such hubris: How could Hamid include me in his “you”; how can there be such a thing as a universally relevant parable about the “human condition”; there’s no way a short novel about the pursuit of riches in rising Asia relates directly to the exit strategy for a middle-aged, middle-class American. I am wrong.

Gerry Hogan is a lawyer living in Columbia, Md. 

 

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