Short Takes
The Reluctant Fundamentalist
By Mohsin Hamid
Harcourt, 184 pp., $22
In this narrative tour de force a young Pakistani sits down at a table in a Lahore café and begins to unburden himself to its sole occupant, an anonymous American. We have entered the familiar landscape of the "oriental" tale in which a traveler is buttonholed by a stranger with a compelling story to unfold. But the author, Mohsin Hamid, has more than one genre up his sleeve.
His narrator, Changez, tells a tale of cross-cultural metamorphosis. Only a few short years ago he was poised to become a master of the universe, just out of Princeton, newly recruited by an elite Wall Street firm, and infatuated with a very pretty, very rich, and very disturbed young woman named Erica. Then came 9/11. All of a sudden Changez was no longer an immigrant golden boy in people's eyes but a swarthy and suspicious alien, harassed at airports and secretly pleased to see the mighty Americans brought low.
Changez's relationship with America parallels his relationship with Erica, an object of desire who does not desire him and whose psychosis by its nature excludes and bewilders him. On the surface an exotic thriller, "The Reluctant Fundamentalist" unsettles and instructs as it seizes our attention from end to ambiguous end.
The Rose Café: Love and War in Corsica
By John Hanson Mitchell
Shoemaker & Hoard, 243 pp., $25
An American student in Paris in the early 1960s, John Hanson Mitchell rambled south for the summer and didn't stop until he got to Corsica, a Mediterranean island so fragrant with laurel rose and thyme that he could sense it before he could see it as his ferry from Nice approached. Over the years Mitchell has written eloquently about many wild and beautiful places. For him, this was where it all began.
In exchange for room and board at a colorful seaside inn, the embryo author scaled fish and washed dishes while he observed the island flora and fauna, whether the voluble local folk who'd stop by the bar for gossip and a game of cards, or the polyglot cast of jaded European visitors seeking sanctuary for a week, a season, forever. Still haunted by memories of the Occupation, they'd tell their wartime stories to the quiet young American who had another war on his mind, the one in Vietnam, where his draft board would send him if it could find him.
Mitchell is a master of sensual detail. His Corsican idyll, youth's paradise lost, enchants, still vivid and affecting some 40 summers gone.
Flight
By Sherman Alexie
Black Cat, 181 pp., paperback, $13
The teenage American Indian protagonist of "Flight," known as "Zits" for obvious adolescent reasons, has spent his young life shuttling between foster care and juvenile detention, though we can see he has a sense of humor about it. During a brief run-in with the cops, he tells us, he is put in a holding cell "with a black kid and a white kid and a Chinese kid. We're the United Nations of juvenile delinquents."
Out on the streets again, lonely, rebellious Zits is befriended by one of his former cellmates, a charismatic sociopath with a hoard of weapons, looking for a disciple to help use them. Without any adult to guide him, Zits needs to find an identity and ethical grounding of his own -- immediately if not sooner. On cue the novel jumps into a shape-shifting, time-traveling fourth dimension, sweeping Zits along on a character-forming roller-coaster ride through the bad-trip theme park of American history.
Sherman Alexie, who has been called the Native American James Baldwin, writes with anger, humor, raw inventiveness, and defiant pride. We're pretty sure that Zits is too cool a kid to be headed for a tragic ending, no matter how postmodern, but it's touch and go for a while.
Amanda Heller is a critic and editor who lives in Newton. 
