A meditation on nostalgia's dangers

Mohsin Hamid's highly praised first novel, "Moth Smoke," was set in his native Lahore, Pakistan, and deftly charted a young banker's descent into crime, drugs, and alienation. "The Reluctant Fundamentalist" is a more meditative but no less gripping account of an ambitious young Pakistani man's ascent in corporate America and the gradual, inevitable transformation forced on him by the attacks of 9/11 and, more important , by the American response to those attacks. Hamid spoke from his home in London.

Q Is this a more autobiographical novel than "Moth Smoke"?

A I write from what I know -- I don't do a lot of research -- so in "Moth Smoke" I had friends who had been hooked on heroin, I was familiar with that particular milieu. In "The Reluctant Fundamentalist," well, I grew up in Lahore, went to Princeton, worked in New York. Neither of the novels is really my story, but I could easily be a cousin of the protagonist in either one.

Q Were you tempted to write a memoir?

A Not at all, because for me a memoir is an attempt to understand where one has been, and a novel is an attempt to go where one has not gone. Many of the things that the main character, Changez, explores are things that I am also preoccupied with, but his choices are not mine. They're my imagining of what it would be like to be someone who makes such choices.

Q The novel's narrative style is courtly, even archaic. Why is that?

A I wrote seven drafts of this novel over seven years, and in each one I played with different forms of narration. It was like a puzzle, and with this voice I finally picked the lock. I think it works for a number of reasons. It comes from the almost 19th-century Anglo-Indian, Anglo-Pakistani way of speaking that's taught in many private schools in Pakistan. I also love the fact that because this voice sounds anachronistic it resonates with some American conceptions of the Muslim world, a world that seems to some Americans as though it's speaking from the past. At the same time Americans admire that formal kind of elocution, so it plays on both of those notions.

Q Why do you describe Sept. 11 in such an elliptical way?

A Partly because the first draft was written before Sept. 11 happened and much of the struggle in writing this novel was the attempt to tell a story about people when events speak so much more loudly. Setting the novel before Sept. 11 seemed false and ineffectual because it looms over the narrative whatever you do. I needed to confront this head - on, but I didn't want the book to be about that. You said the event is eclipsed in the novel. And how do you look at an eclipse? You look at it indirectly because it's blinding otherwise, and that's how I had to treat it.

Q It is in Chile, not Pakistan or America, that Changez confronts his identity. Why?

A Well, he's returned from Pakistan and he's feeling very conflicted, like he's betraying where he's come from, and he's looking for a reason to give up his current life. I had also been to Chile, and what struck me about Valparaiso was the melancholy that results from a former great city no longer having its purpose. That sense of lost grandeur resonates so strongly with my feelings about Lahore, the former capital of the Mogul Empire. There are other resonances in Chile because of the military history, the dramatic social changes, and the continuing role of religion in their society. For all of those reasons it just felt like the right place.

Q You mention "lost grandeur," and your narrator observes that post- Sept. 11 America surrendered to a "dangerous nostalgia." Could you explain?

A To me the book is fundamentally about nostalgia. Changez is unable to become fully American, partly because he can't forget Pakistan. Erica, whom Changez loves, can't forget her dead boyfriend, and America itself is trying to remember the simpler past of the Second World War, when things felt right and people righteous. So nostalgia permeates the novel. And it's a combination of fear and nostalgia that I think the world is feeding on now. In America you have generals talking about honor and duty. You have Osama Bin Laden's appeal to this medieval past for Muslims. Even countries like Holland and Denmark are looking back to a time when they were all homogenous and happy. We've made this bogeyman -- which is not to say that fundamentalism and terrorism are not dangerous, they are -- and we need to get a sense of proportion back. Empathy is the key. If we can imagine being the other person, he becomes much less frightening. Most of those bearded guys don't want to kill anybody, and they won't. They're just regular people.

Anna Mundow, a freelance journalist living in Central Massachusetts, is a correspondent for the Irish Times. She can be reached via e-mail at ama1668@hotmail.com.