A Pakistani-American Voice In Search Of A True Home

LONDON

Moshin Hamid

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 youre 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 its 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 novels 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.

Im a British citizen, yet here they refer to me as a Pakistani novelist, he said. In America, even though Ive 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 Britains 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 Americas 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. Its a tragic love story. The book doesnt try to say America is bad, its how someone can be disillusioned with America.

Religion plays little role in the novel. Similarly, in Mr. Hamids 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, theres a sense of being humiliated and then threatened — thats what makes it insufferable.

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