When I returned to New York from San Francisco, I promptly began to recommend Pereira to everyone who asked me for the name of a great book to read.
It was not long before I went back to Pereira myself. I had just published my first novel earlier that year, and I had begun work on my second. I had consciously chosen to do something different this time, to abandon multiple narrators and essayistic interludes for an approach more restrained, seemingly simple — and brief. I had first encountered Pereira primarily as a reader. When I looked at it again, months later, I did so as an apprentice.
I began by trying to understand how Pereira managed to achieve so much with so few words. But I was soon asking myself another question. How, with such serious and pressing concerns, did Pereira manage to be so difficult to put down? Put differently, how could this most literary of novels also be such a thrilling page-turner?
I found my answers in Pereira’s form. Pereira’s brevity, it seemed to me, gave the novel a lightness that counterbalanced the weight of its subject matter. Moreover, because it was short it was able to move quickly, or at least able to give the impression of moving quickly. After all, there was only so much ground for the reader to cover between beginning and end.
But even though its compactness was unusual, what seemed to me most striking about the form of Pereira was its use of the testimonial. The novel is not a traditional third-person narrative in which Pereira is himself merely a character. Nor is it a traditional first-person narrative in which Pereira tells us the story of his “I.” Instead we have a testimony, with Pereira presumably testifying to an account of his actions transcribed by someone else.
The result is mysterious, menacing, enthralling, and mind-bending — all at once. Through the testimonial form, Pereira makes detectives of its readers. We are unsettled and given more to do. An unexpected interpretative space opens up before us, nags at us, seduces us. We feel more like characters than we are used to. And if my experience is anything to go by, we love it.
Pereira’s politics grow more pressing by the day, as absolutist ideologies and paranoid states increasingly impact our lives. And the lessons Pereira teaches about how fiction works have the power to transform. Certainly they changed this writer. Without Pereira, my own second novel would not have been written as it is. For that, and for the pleasure Pereira has repeatedly given me, I am deeply grateful.
(2010)
My Reluctant Fundamentalist
IN THE SUMMER OF 2000, I began writing my second novel. I was living on Cornelia Street in New York’s West Village, working as a management consultant at McKinsey & Company with the unusual understanding that I would be allowed to disappear from the office for three months a year to write. I was close to paying off the hundred thousand dollars in loans I had taken out to finance law school; I had published my first novel, Moth Smoke, a few months earlier; and I was able to return regularly for extended periods to Lahore, the city in Pakistan where I had mostly grown up. The time had come for me to decide what to do with my life, and where to do it.
The choices I faced were confusing. New York or Lahore? Novelist as my entire profession or as only a part? And the choices were related. If I left my job to write full-time, I would lose my employment-based work visa and be forced to depart permanently for Pakistan. As I had done once before, I turned to my writing to help me understand my split self and my split world. Moth Smoke had for me been a look at Pakistan with a gaze altered by the many years I had spent in America. The Reluctant Fundamentalist, I thought, would be a look at America with a gaze reflecting the part of myself that remained stubbornly Pakistani.
By the summer of 2001 I had produced a draft. I had consciously moved away from the multiple first-person narration and freestyle riffs of Moth Smoke. I had instead written a stripped-down, utterly minimalist love story of a young Pakistani man in New York who is troubled by the notion that he is a modern-day janissary serving the empire of American corporatism. The style was that of a fable, of a parable, the kind of folk or religious story one looks to for guidance, because of course guidance was what I needed.
But upon reading it my agent told me he was puzzled by the protagonist’s inner conflict: why would so secular and Westernized a Muslim man feel such tension with America? I told him there was deep resentment in much of the rest of the world toward the sole remaining superpower, and I resigned myself to a process of writing that would mirror that of my first novel, which took some seven drafts and seven years to complete. I also accepted a temporary transfer to my firm’s London office as a way of deferring my life decisions, thinking the city lay geographically and culturally midway between New York and Lahore. And so it was from across the Atlantic in September that I watched the World Trade Center fall in a place I still thought of as home.
The rest of that year was one of great turmoil for me. Muslim friends of mine in America began to be questioned and harassed; I was distressed by the war in Afghanistan; traveling on my Pakistani passport became increasingly unpleasant; and then, following the December terrorist attacks on India’s parliament, it looked as though India might invade Pakistan. Lahore sits on the border, just a few miles from what would have been the front line. I knew I needed to be there with my family. So I took a leave of absence and went back, moving into my old room.
That crisis eventually passed. But my novel made little progress. I had chosen to keep it set in the year before September 11, so that my characters would not be overwhelmed by an event that spoke so much more loudly than any individual’s story could. I grew personally more divided, saddened and dismayed by the heavy-handedness of the Bush administration’s conduct abroad. I decided to make my transfer to London permanent. I met the woman I would later marry when she was visiting the city on holiday. I was inspired to quit my job. Until she moved to London after our wedding, I was often on airplanes between there and Lahore.
Eventually, I realized that, just as in my exterior world, there was no escaping the effects of September 11 in the interior world that was my novel. The story of a Pakistani man in New York who leaves just before that cataclysmic event would inevitably be bathed in the glare of the reader’s knowledge of what would happen immediately after. I also felt enough time had passed for me to have something of the distance that distinguishes a novelist’s perspective from a journalist’s. So I rewrote the novel once again, this time set around the period of September 11, and I finished early in 2005.
The novel was still short, and the basic arc of the plot was unchanged. But I had chosen to shift the voice into an American-accented first person. My intention was to tell a story that felt, for the first third, deceptively familiar, a tale of the sort of American dream now so often told that it lulls us into a lazy complacency. Then, relying on the strength of that bond between reader and narrator, I would venture into more and more emotionally disturbing territory.
This did not entirely work, unfortunately, as my agent and a former editor made clear to me when they read it. But I could see I was close to something now. For me, writing a novel is like solving a puzzle. I had tried variations of minimalism in the third person, with voices ranging from fable to noir. I had tried the comforting oral cadences of an American-accented first person. But there was not enough of Pakistan in my novel, and it felt wrong somehow both to my ear, in its sound, and to my eye, in its architecture.