Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid

I've joined a book group again!  This is the third book that I've read with the new group.

The Reluctant Fundamentalist is a brief novel told in the second person.  The narrator is a Pakistani who meets a stranger on a street in Pakistan, takes him for tea and then supper, all the while telling the anonymous listener the story of his life.

The narrator is a young Pakistani man from a 'good' but impoverished family who travels to the US for University, falls in love with an American woman, and works for an American finance firm for a couple of years before becoming disillusioned and returning home post-911.

This is a book that I didn't enjoy on first reading.   I'm all for artificiality -- I read science fiction! I enjoy meta-narratives! I am not opposed to the post-modern -- but the frame story felt contrived, and the ambiguous ending seemed like a gimmick.  Overall, it seemed to me that the book was an overly clever attempt to educate post-911  Americans about why they were not necessarily universally loved.

The night before the book group meeting I picked it up again in an attempt to figure out something more to say about the book during our discussion.  This was a useful exercise.   The book was actually more cleverly structured and written than I had originally noticed.  The narrator's American love....was actually a metaphor for America.  The title of the book was actually significant, and rather different than I had assumed.   No matter where I opened it, I found quotable text that not only moved the plot along, but illustrated the underlying themes of the book in ways that I hadn't noticed when I was concentrating on the plot.

The discussion during out meeting last night was also useful.  It reminded me of how immediately engaging the book was, and how the second person narration pulled you in to the story.  It pulled out details of the book, its plot, and its characters in ways that I hadn't thought of myself.

In summary, reading this book as part of a book club made me appreciate it much more than I would have had I encountered it on my own.   I still think that its topicality is one of the reasons that it was short-listed for a Man Booker when it was published in the mid-2000s.  But is that such a bad thing?  And the book is better-written and more complex than I initially gave it credit for.