Sharing life’s most intimate experiences
The book was admired for its power and unusual form. Hamid’s new novel, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, is as inventive and emotional. Structured as a self-help book, the story concerns the life of a rural boy who migrates to Lahore.
He struggles to fit in and to find success. There are heartbreaking scenes; such as the death of his mother, and the slow disintegration of his marriage.
The protagonist is never named; neither are the other characters, and the tone of the novel is remote. Yet the reader is subsumed into the story, empathetic towards all the characters and their hardships.
Hamid is in Dublin for a reader’s event. Meeting him a few hours beforehand, I asked him how he achieved such intimacy.
“I thought, ‘if I ask a stranger to have a tender relationship with the novel, they will go screaming in the other direction’. I thought, ‘if I began the book cynically, with a certain degree of roughness, then, when they’ve spent 120 pages, or three to four hours in the book’s company, it’s possible to ask for a different relationship, and not be rejected by the reader’,” he says.
How aware is he of the reader, when he’s writing? “I’m aware of creating a playground for readers,” he says. “I don’t want to deliver a determined meaning that they must guess to have read the book properly. I wanted to leave space for them to exercise feeling and judgement, and then reflect back a bit of that feeling to themselves. So, I’m not designing an amusement park ride, but more a house.
“Reading a novel, I think, is one of the most intimate experiences we have. It’s the only time we allow someone else’s thoughts to come directly to the place where we contain our own thoughts; and we’re in solitude, for hours.
“The writer’s words come into the place where the reader’s thoughts already reside. And a duet commences. So I write one set of musical notes that comprise a duet.”
This was evident in The Reluctant Fundamentalist. Taking place over one evening in Lahore, a Pakistani, Changez, talks to an American about his love for a woman there, and his eventual abandonment of America. It’s a monologue; so the reader is left to imagine the American’s words.
The new novel, covering a man’s lifetime, is different in more than tone.
That, Hamid says, is because his life has changed utterly in the years since he penned that last book.
“It’s the first novel I’ve written since I returned to tri-generational life,” he says. “I grew up in a household where there were sisters, cousins, parents, uncles, aunts and grandparents. Every month, there was someone being born, or a funeral to attend. But in my 20s and 30s, I lived in London and New York with people my own age.
“Now, my wife and I have returned to Lahore, with our small daughter and son, in an apartment upstairs from my parents. Living like that does alter your sense of identity and time and empathy.
“I wanted to write a novel that followed the full arc of human life, and when you look at a mono-generational, that flattens into a straight line. If you can broaden the 10- or 20-year slice of life to 60, 70 or 80 years, you get that arc. If you’re in the middle of it, you are emotionally tested at both ends, musing both on mortality and life, and what it is to be human.”
There have been other changes. Hamid no longer has a day job. Until recently, while writing, he was also a student, or had a job in business. He gave that up when his children, a daughter aged three, and a son, 11 months, arrived.
“Nothing has changed me more as a human being and a writer as becoming a father,” he says. “Children connect you to other people and to humanity. I would not have written this novel had I not been a father. It was in that I recognised my humanity, present in my children and theirs in me; and, also, my humanity present in my parents, and theirs in me.”
The world could have missed out on Hamid’s novels altogether, had he not taken a creative writing module while studying international relations in Princeton, USA.
His tutors included both Joyce Carol Oates and Toni Morrison.
“That was extraordinary,” Hamid says. “And the great thing was, being 20, I wasn’t yet in total awe of them. I knew they were great writers, but I hadn’t read enough to realise how important they were. I couldn’t put them into context.
“I was enormously fortunate to have such writers reading my stuff, and giving me feedback. They treated me like a colleague. They allowed me to dream that I could be a writer. Up to that point, I never could have been. Without a doubt, had I not taken those courses, I would not be a writer today.”
Morrison taught him another vital lesson.
“She said to me, ‘keep the reader a half heartbeat ahead of the action in the novel.’ They should not know what is coming, but once it happens they should feel it was inevitable.
“There are so many ways in which you can set up the resonances which will be experienced as plot later on. You can use tonality, shading, cadence and imagery.”
How to get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, at 228 pages, is a slim book. How did it take six years? “This novel was, initially, a series of vignettes of people of all different ages and classes scattered across Pakistan,” Hamid says. “But it didn’t work and I threw it away. Not a single word survives.
“I spent years on drafts two and three and four. Each time, I thought I was doing something great. Maybe I’d realise, half way through, that this is terrible, or maybe I’d show the finished draft to my wife, and she’d say, ‘this doesn’t work’. I’d think, ‘our relationship is over, she doesn’t understand me’. Then, three days later, I’d think, ‘she is right’. I have come to realise there is a cocoon-making stage.
“I’m just spinning the silk, which will encompass me when the wings come out. But something happens in my final draft, and I realise the novel is where I want it to be.
“And if my editor or agent doesn’t like it, that I will find someone else who does.”
In making the book so brief, the narrative jumps. Suddenly, we realise the hero is married; or has a five-year-old son.
“I wanted to write a sprawling 19th century novel encompassed in a 200-page book.
In a world informed by television, where narrative forms the jump cut, and the sequel takes place ten years later, novelists can do that now. If you did that in the 19th century, it would be jarring to the reader.
“Writing, for me, is like digging a hole and waiting. It’s not some heroic quest.
“You create a void into which art comes. It involves inactivity. Boredom. Silence. Solitude. These are the things that novels are born of.”
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