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I began the novel in the summer of 2000, shortly after Moth Smoke
was published, and a full year before the events of 9/11. I had spent
much of the previous decade living in America, and I wanted to explore
in fiction my own growing desire to leave. It was confusing territory
for me, because I loved – and still love – so much about America, and
yet was still uncertain about staying on. Similarly, I loved Pakistan
and yet felt unsettled about returning there. Also, I was working as a
management consultant and as a novelist, so I was professionally torn.
Those fissures, cracks in my tribal identity and cracks in my romantic
identity – romantic in the sense that "what do you want to be when you
grow up?" is a passionate question – gave birth to the first draft of
the novel, an utterly minimalist account of a Pakistani valuation expert
who decides to return to Pakistan despite loving New York.
At first, no, because it was not yet a timely subject. All I knew was
that I wanted to stretch myself as a writer. Moth Smoke was in form a
novel with multiple voices and in style one with a degree of
bacchanalian abandon to its prose. So I set out to write The Reluctant
Fundamentalist with a single
voice, very stripped down and spare. Then, of course, three months after I
finished my first draft 9/11 happened. Delicate themes I was exploring
became newspaper headlines. I decided to hold my course and wrote another
draft still set in time before 9/11. But it was a struggle and seemed
somehow false: pretending to ignore what I knew would happen later. I then
completely revised the novel again and addressed 9/11 directly. I say
"revised" but actually I don't look at previous drafts in the early stages
of writing a novel. I write my first few drafts from scratch every time,
incorporating elements from memory, and drafts can be so different as to
be almost different novels. In any case, it took me a very long time to
begin to digest 9/11, and Afghanistan, and the almost-war between Pakistan
and India, and Iraq. By the fifth draft, which I finished in 2005, I had
arrived at the characters and plot line of the current novel. But I wasn't
yet happy with it. And yes, at that point I was worried about how to
handle the subject matter. I knew what I wanted to say, but it was
complicated and perhaps controversial, and I wanted to say it effectively
– in other words, in a way that used the seductive power of narrative
fiction to deliver something not entirely palatable.
I got an honest reaction to my fifth draft from my agent, Jay Mandel,
and from the editor of Moth Smoke, Becky Saletan. They said it was a
good idea poorly executed. And they were right. I also got an extremely
supportive rejection letter from Jonathan Galassi at Farrar Straus &
Giroux, who had been a big supporter of Moth Smoke and told me he was
surprised by my failure to deliver something he could love as much. The
fifth draft had been written in an American voice and in linear first
person, without a frame. Jonathan suggested the voice was too familiar
and the onset of tension was too late in the narrative. I got this bad
news the day I was going to propose to my wife. But a week later I had
figured out how to make the novel work. I decided on a voice that was
courtly and menacing, a vaguely anachronistic voice rooted in the
Anglo-Indian heritage of elite Pakistani schools and suggestive of an
older system of values and of an abiding historical pride. And I decided
on a frame that allowed two points of view, two perspectives, to exist
with only one narrator, thereby creating a double mirror for the mutual
societal suspicion with which Pakistan views America and America views
Pakistan. Those two decisions unlocked the potential of the novel. I
finished the sixth draft a year later, in early 2006. Simon Prosser at
Hamish Hamilton bought it right away and then I worked with him and with
Becky, who bought it for Harcourt in America, on the final edits.
I am a strong believer in the intertwined nature of the personal and
the political; I think they move together. In the case of Changez, his
political situation as a Pakistani immigrant fuels his love for Erica,
and his abandonment by Erica fuels his political break with America.
Similarly, I think countries are like people. Not that countries are
monolithic – even people have fractured identities and conflicting
impulses – but notions of pride, passion, nostalgia, and envy shape the
behavior of countries more than is sometimes acknowledged. In the Muslim
world, one sees love for things American co-exist with anger towards
America. Which is stronger, politics or love, is like asking which is
stronger, exhaling or inhaling. They are two sides of the same thing.
Yes and no. I had no single individual in mind, but there is a type of
person – and not just in America – who exists in places of power and
feels entitled to impose their will on others. One sees this sort of
person at Princeton, at Harvard, in New York, in military uniforms, on
Fox News – and also, although the Pakistani narrator does not say this,
one sees them with brown skin and Pakistani accents in Islamabad, in
mosques, and in footage of caves in the mountains as well.
I am not much of a researcher as a novelist; I write mainly from
experience. Of course, The Reluctant Fundamentalist is not the story
of me or of my life. But I do know what it is like to go to Princeton,
to work in corporate New York, and to go back to Lahore as war with
India looms. If my novels were real, I probably would not be the
protagonist, but would fit in quite nicely as a minor character, as a
native in the milieu. That said, I have to imagine being other people – being all the fictional characters I create – because if I cannot
imagine being them I cannot empathize with them, and empathy is at the
heart of being a novelist because it is what the relationship between
reading and writing seeks to achieve.
My first two novels have taken seven years each and that is quite a
gestation period. So yes, it has felt like an oyster giving away a
pearl. For all that my novels are not my story, they are about the
issues I am most passionate about at the time, the issues I am seeking
to understand and make sense of for myself. So I invest a great deal of
myself in them. It is hard to let a novel go when it is doing something
so important for you, but it is also an enormous relief.
How much time I spend varies, but I always tend to write on my laptop in
bed. Terrible, I know, but there you have it. Sometimes I try to go to
beautiful places – Italy, Chile, the Philippines – or even set up a
desk in my flat in front of a window, but wherever I am, my bed feels
the most natural place. Then again, I suppose that isn't so strange.
Writing is a creative act, after all, and most of the human race is
created in bed.
My next novel has been forming in my head for about a year now, and
once my book tour is over I will need to get down to it. I am both
excited and hesitant to embark upon something new: after a seven-year,
monogamous fictional relationship part of me wants to play the field.
But I write novels because I need to – I think I would be very sad if I
was not creating a universe in my head – so I will commit to it soon
enough. I already have a title, plot, characters, formal structure, and
tone of voice. Of course, knowing me, every single one of those things
is guaranteed to change completely by the time I am done.
 The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid is out now in Hamish Hamilton hardback Read more
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