The reluctant fundamentalist

Well, that was a disappointing couple of hours.

Not wasted, not infuriating, not boring, just... disappointing. I mean, I really liked Hamid's debut, Mothsmoke. And with the Booker nomination and all, I really thought I was in for a treat here.

But... nah. The Reluctant Fundamentalist is a pretty decent novel; in Changez (Genghis), it adopts the by now not exactly unique "reverse Heart of Darkness" approach (see, for instance, Kiran Desai's The Inheritance of Loss or Tayeb Salih's Season of Migration to the North); young 3rd-world student goes West to learn, yet can't quite make it fit with his own background and his own country's needs. And it's done reasonably well; sure, his shift towards what the title implies seems sudden, and the Erica/America allegory is a bit overworked, but it's... OK. He occasionally makes some rather harsh comments on American policies and culture that fit, though arguably they might have fit better in an essay.

Then there's the whole framework, which I have more problems with. As good a writer as Hamid is, he tramples all over "show, don't tell" and it's simply not credible. There are far too many references to set the scene, to tell us what the narrator is seeing even though the one he's talking to would see the same thing, too many passages that sound more like carefully worded writing rather than spontaneous sharing of experiences over dinner.

The Reluctant Fundamentalist is a nice book. It makes interesting points, even if it's simply by having the narrator tell us them. It has an interesting story, even if it's somewhat shallowly told. It has some interesting visuals and parallels - the janissaries bit is truly inspired, as is the dig at the American sort of fundamentalism - even if...

...you get the idea. Nice work. Hardly essential.