Changes

|title=The Reluctant Fundamentalist

|sort=Reluctant Fundamentalist

|date=April 2008

|isbn=978-0141029542

}}

At a café in an old part of Lahore, a Pakistani man acts treats a mysterious and a rather nervous American to a story of his encounter - and disillusionment - with the American Dream. A scion of a old family of Pakistani professionals, who still remember the old but now faded glories, he goes to Princeton on a special scholarship and on graduation is recruited by an elite firm of business valuers. New York is a revelation - a cosmopolitan centre '' of the most advanced technological civilisation in the world'' - a country in itself - and his drive and talents are recognised and appreciated, while he doesn't question either the life he's personally living or the values of the world he's joined. The attacks of September 11 come as a shock and what follows is a brilliant description of Changez', well, change (the name pun is one of the few annoyances in what's otherwise a brilliant book). His initial reaction rang very true to me: a strong pang of guilty satisfaction at the symbolism of the event, even if followed by the horrified realisation of the immediate human cost (I felt like that - and I am neither Muslim nor Asian!). What followed was an unravelling of the Americanisation of Changez' charted in sharp, quick strokes, but very convincingly. What I particularly relished was that Hamid avoided the temptation of making his character victimised in any way: he's not persecuted or singled out and even his small defiant symbolic gestures of reasserting his own ethic identity in the face of ''America invading New York'' (eg keeping a beard after returning from a holiday visit to Pakistan) pass without meaningful consequences: he hears of beatings and harassments, but he himself is cushioned from that by the money and status of his newly acquired career, and possibly just lucky: being called '' a fucking Arab'' is the worst that happens to him personally. And yet he changes: reconsiders his allegiances, responsibilities and the right and wrongs of the situation, he eventually (with a little input from a communist Chilean bookseller) completely re-evaluates his position.