This was indeed, Hamid said, "a novelistic tip of the hat, acknowledging a debt". The reader pointed out that this recalled the name of the narrator in Albert Camus's La Chute ( The Fall), Jean-Baptiste Clamence. In Chile, where he is assessing the "fundamentals" of an ailing publishing company, Changez encounters the world-weary but worldly-wise head of the company who is called Juan-Bautista. "It could have come straight out of the pages of the novel." Somebody who has managed to be "so prophetic" would have to expect to be asked about the future of Pakistan – and he duly was.Ī canny reader spotted that the name of the character who gives Changez the final push away from America is an allusion to Hamid's main literary source. "It strikes me that there is a lot of prescience in this book," observed another reader, referring to the "incident in Lahore" (the arrest of an American CIA agent who shot two men who had threatened him in the street).
Hamid also denied one reader's description of The Reluctant Fundamentalist as a book with a political thesis, yet readers did take it as the analysis of attitudes and beliefs that might shape political events. And this had, he agreed, shaped Changez's own dramatic monologue, in which he infers the thoughts of his listener from gestures, or the tone of his voice. His education in reductive psychological analysis at the hands of his New York valuation company certainly did draw heftily on the author's own experience working for a Manhattan management consultancy. Readers were clearly not mistaken in finding material from his own life in the novel – though he denied that Changez's unsettlingly perceptive mentor Jim, or his mournful almost-lover Erica, were based on real people. The evening's first questioner suggested that 9/11 might have transformed the novel, but Hamid said not. Yet the catastrophe, and this response, were, Hamid acknowledged, inserted into a narrative that was already formed.
As he remembers this, Changez tells his unnamed American companion that "despicable as it may sound, my initial reaction was to be remarkably pleased". This meant that early drafts of the novel had been written before 9/11, an event that the protagonist watches on television in Manila, where he has been sent to value a music recording business. The Reluctant Fundamentalist did indeed take this long to complete. "Presumably you're working on your next novel – is that also taking you seven years?" asked one reader, drily. When Mohsin Hamid came to discuss it at the Guardian book club, several readers mentioned the protracted gestation of his fiction. The Reluctant Fundamentalist is a small book that took a long time to write.
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