How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia by Mohsin Hamid
Love and Ambition in a Cruel New World
Mohsin Hamid’s 2007 novel, “The Reluctant Fundamentalist,” was an artful tour de force, a lapidary
monologue delivered by a young Princeton-educated Pakistani that opened out to
become a puzzlelike exploration of identity, and a suspenseful, post-Sept. 11
meditation on the nervous, mutually suspicious dynamic between America and the
Muslim world.
Mr. Hamid’s new novel, “How to Get Filthy Rich
in Rising Asia,” also tells a compelling story that works on two levels — in
this case as a deeply moving and highly specific tale of love and ambition, and
as a larger, metaphorical look at the mind-boggling social and economic changes
sweeping “rising Asia.”
Set in an unnamed country that resembles
Pakistan the novel chronicles the 70-odd-year-long life of an unnamed hero who
journeys from an impoverished village to a sprawling city and who makes — and
loses — a fortune in the water (“bottled hydration”) business.
The story is couched as a kind of self-help
book and told in the second person, with a protagonist referred to only as
“you.” What might initially seem like a clumsy narrative technique is actually
a device that allows Mr. Hamid to zoom in and out from his hero’s life, as
though he were using a telephoto lens, moving in to give us
up-close-and-personal glimpses of “you’s” enduring relationship with a woman he
meets when they are teenagers (she is always referred to as “the pretty girl”)
then moving back to show us the ways in which his entrepreneurial career
mirrors that of millions of others as they become part of a new urbanized
demographic that is changing the shape of the world.
Of the decision of “you’s”
father to move his immediate family from their small village (where “you” grew
up surrounded by dozens of relatives) and their arrival in the metropolis, Mr.
Hamid writes: “As you and your parents and siblings dismount, you embody one of
the great changes of your time. Where once your clan was innumerable, not
infinite but of a large number not readily known, now there are five of you.
Five. The fingers on one hand, the toes on one foot, a minuscule aggregation
when compared with shoals of fish or flocks of birds or indeed tribes of
humans.” He adds that the change in family dynamics was in itself “an explosive
transformation,” the “supportive, stifling, stabilizing bonds of extended
relationships weakening and giving way, leaving in their wake insecurity,
anxiety, productivity and potential.”
In the big city “you” gets
himself an education — another step on the ladder of getting filthy rich — and
a job delivering DVDs for a video retailer, which brings him into contact with
the pretty girl, a movie buff, who works at a beauty salon and is plotting her
escape from her dysfunctional family. He falls in love with the pretty girl and
installs her as the ideal woman in his heart, where she will remain ever after.
The pretty girl, who seems way more liberated than the hero, has sex with him
but does so the night before running away with a man who says he recognizes
“her potential to be a model.”
“You” goes to a university and falls in with
some sort of political organization that in exchange for membership offers him
“a monthly cash stipend, food and clothing, and a bed.” He grows a beard and
notices that wealthier students and corrupt administrators now regard him with
something like fear. After his mother dies a horribly painful death from
cancer, he begins to drift away from the organization: its clinic tells him
there was nothing to be done to alleviate his mother’s condition except prayer,
and its members exhort him to recognize his comrades as his one “true family.”
Business becomes his new religion. He realizes
that if he is to become as successful as the pretty girl — who has become a
well-known model who “earns as much as a retail banker her age” — he must
become an entrepreneur. From a job as “a non-expired-labeled expired-goods
salesman” (which means exactly what it sounds like, selling old items that have
been relabeled with new expiration dates) he sets himself up as a bottled-water
tycoon. What starts out as a small-time scam — pouring boiled tap water into
mineral-water bottles recovered from restaurants — gradually evolves into a
thriving big-time business, enabling “you” to ascend into the firmament of the
wealthy with a big house, a driver and lots of security to protect him from the
envious rabble.
As his first novel, “Moth Smoke,” so deftly demonstrated, Mr. Hamid has
high-frequency radar for status distinctions, and in these pages he provides an
acerbic, almost anthropological sense of how bribes and corruption grease the
social system in his not-quite-Pakistan. He also records the envy, resentment
and desire to emulate that America and the West provoke. For instance a retired
brigadier describes his awe-making plan of creating a “premier housing”
development that would have “its own electricity plant” (meaning, no blackouts)
and drinkable tap water. When you enter it, “it’ll be like you’ve entered
another country,” he says. “Another continent. Like you’ve gone to Europe. Or
North America.”
In Mr. Hamid’s not-Pakistan-exactly, change has
arrived in fits and starts: poverty and high-tech modernity exist side by side,
turning the country into a patchwork of the old and new, and the ugly urban
sprawl of the in-between.
“In the city’s outskirts,” Mr. Hamid writes,
“on one of a thousand and one rutted streets where a few years ago were only
fields but now little green can be seen, unplanned development having yielded
instead a ribbon of convenience stores, auto garages, scrap-metal dealers,
unregistered educational institutes, fly-by-night dental clinics and
mobile-phone top-up and repair points, all fronting warrens of housing
perilously unresistant to earthquakes, or even, for that matter, torrential
rain.”
It is a measure of Mr. Hamid’s audacious
talents that he manages to make his protagonist’s story work on so many levels.
“You” is, at once, a modern-day Horatio Alger character, representing the
desires and frustrations of millions in rising Asia; a bildungsroman hero, by
turns knavish and recognizably human, who sallies forth from the provinces to
find his destiny; and a nameless but intimately known soul, whose bittersweet
romance with the pretty girl possesses a remarkable emotional power. With “How
to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia” Mr. Hamid reaffirms his place as one of his
generation’s most inventive and gifted writers.
By Mohsin Hamid
228 pages. Riverhead Books. $26.95.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/22/books/how-to-get-filthy-rich-in-rising-asia-by-mohsin-hamid.html
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