There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact

I realized that it is somewhat peculiar that every reader is looking for something new in a book of fiction. If you read the reviews, the cause of disappointment with a book is very often the same one. I think if somebody studies the statistics of why a book is disliked, this particular reason might be a big percentage. Yet, people are also skeptical about ideas that are too far-fetched. They also demand that the concepts should be able to survive practically and that they should be germane to the theme of real world. Why I find it peculiar is that the ideas that we call hackneyed are the ones that we really never think about or even bother to observe, although it is by them that we are affected the most.

I finally completed reading all of the three Mohsin Hamid's books and I think I see now what his pattern is. He simply picks up a stereotype and turns it into an enigma. Though I would like to add that the settings might not be cliché for Western audience but being a Pakistani, I can tell that all his characters are those that we already have in our minds. All the things about his characters are what we say when we talk about those class of people in general and we even have commonly used maxims for the concepts.

The characters in Moth Smoke are the general egoistic, vindictive and licentious elite class with restless and unhappy marital relationships and the hopeless, unemployed, educated and intelligent but morally timid and ease-loving middle class and the impossible friendship between the two.

The Reluctant Fundamentalist talks about what we have been hearing for years now: the changing of the attitude of West towards the Muslims after 9/11 and America's self-righteous attitude towards the East despite her own cruelty to Afghanistan and Iraq and the double-standards in her dealings with Pakistan and India. Really, this is all this book is about, yet you don’t know until the end what really is the point the writer is trying to make. The most remarkable thing is that the character Changez is just an average Muslim without any emotional attachment to his religion or his country. He is a good person culturally. He is honest and hard-working and determined to make his way into the world through honesty and hard work, but he refuses to play in the hands of a nation that was the cause of threat to the well-being of his family. Some of the quotes from the book where I think Hamid has very intelligently summed up the situation:

"On the flight I noticed how many of my fellow passengers were similar to me in age: college students and young professionals, heading back after the holidays. I found it ironic; children and the elderly were meant to be sent away from impending battles, but in our case it was the fittest and brightest who were leaving, those who in the past would have been most expected to remain. I was filled with contempt for myself, such contempt that I could not bring myself to converse or to eat. I shut my eyes and waited, and the hours took from me the responsibility even to flee."

"I had always thought of America as a nation that looked forward; for the first time I was struck by its determination to look back. Living in New York was suddenly like living in a film about the Second World War; I, a foreigner, found myself staring out at a set that ought to be viewed not in Technicolor but in grainy black and white."

"that America was engaged only in posturing. As a society, you were unwilling to reflect upon the shared pain that united you with those who attacked you. You retreated into myths of your own difference, assumptions of your own superiority. And you acted out these beliefs on the stage of the world, so that the entire planet was rocked by the repercussions of your tantrums, not least my family, now facing war thousands of miles away. Such an America had to be stopped in the interests not only of the rest of humanity, but also in your own."

In short, through the character of Changez, Hamid states what a man of principles would do in the circumstances.So really nothing new, but presented in a way that echoes its truthfulness.

Then there is How To Get Filthy Rich In Rising Asia. Here again is an image of rise and fall in the life of a stereotyped corrupt business man, whose desire for money has its origin in the extreme poverty and it drives him to overcome all obstacles however he can. The most remarkable and interesting thing I found in this book is that it is written in a very unique way. It calls itself a seIf-help book which is supposed to instruct the reader about how to become filthy rich in contemporary Asia. However, it does so by telling a story of nameless common man, so you can call it a novel. It is very personalized for a self-help book and extremely impersonal for a novel. You want to know what really is going inside the nameless character's head what you never manage to do it as he continues his journey through life committing crimes, giving bribes, getting married and then divorced and then being betrayed and then finally getting together with the love of his life. All the time, the character is a mystery and yet, he is so typical. You might hate him or may be sympathize with him to some extent or pity him if you could somehow know how he was feeling all the time but till the very end, he remains as distant as ever.

Other than that, when I started reading it, I felt that this was going to be overly skeptical and bitterly sarcastic about the Asian culture, which I think is mostly the South-Asian culture. It was like that in the beginning with some very crude descriptions. But later, the tone was more resigned. It looked like one thing was the consequence of the other and that your nameless character starts to blend in the picture about which he was sarcastic earlier as an outsider.

As I said, his journey through life is really nothing new to hear. He was just a common man coming from an extremely poor family and having seen disease and death at the hands of poverty, he obviously wanted to rise to the status of the rich. Having no strong family background and no monetary support available and more importantly having no regard for principles and values, he enters a life of crime and deceit. As he rises, he has to face rivals in the form of business competitors and the state bureaucrats. At the same time, he has to deal with a failed marriage. The reason was probably  his never-ending love for another girl the "pretty girl", who herself was struggling to escape the claws of poverty and secondly, may be his own disturbed and restive mind because of the life he was living. Like I said, you really don’t know what was going inside his head. It is a story of pursuit of a strong financial status and of love in the time of great social and economic upheaval.

So they are all really mundane characters in a really commonly-viewed form of world. But still Mohsin Hamid managed to make three really good books without adding any fantastical adventure in the mix.