Hamid's first novel,
Moth Smoke, told the story of a marijuana-smoking ex-banker in post-nuclear-test Lahore who falls in love with his best friend's wife and becomes a heroin addict. It was published in 2000, and quickly became a cult hit in Pakistan and India. It was also a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award given to the best first novel in the US, and was adapted for television in Pakistan and as an operetta in Italy.
Moth Smoke had an innovative structure, using multiple voices, second person trial scenes, and essays on such topics as the role of air-conditioning in the lives of its main characters. Pioneering a hip, contemporary approach to South Asian fiction, it was considered by some critics to be "the most interesting novel that came out of [its] generation of subcontinent writing." In the
New York Review of Books, Anita Desai noted:
One could not really continue to write, or read about, the slow seasonal changes, the rural backwaters, gossipy courtyards, and traditional families in a world taken over by gun-running, drug-trafficking, large-scale industrialism, commercial entrepreneurship, tourism, new money, nightclubs, boutiques... Where was the Huxley, the Orwell, the Scott Fitzgerald, or even the Tom Wolfe, Jay McInerney, or Brett Easton Ellis to record this new world? Mohsin Hamid's novel Moth Smoke, set in Lahore, is one of the first pictures we have of that world.
His second novel,
The Reluctant Fundamentalist, told the story of a Pakistani man who decides to leave his high-flying life in America after a failed love affair and the terrorist attacks of 9/11. It was published in 2007 and became an international best seller, reaching #4 on the New York Times Best Seller list. The novel was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, won several awards including the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, and was translated into over 25 languages.
The Guardian selected it as one of the books that defined the decade.
Like
Moth Smoke,
The Reluctant Fundamentalist was formally experimentative. The novel used the unusual device of a dramatic monologue in which the Pakistani protagonist continually addresses an American listener who is never heard from directly. (Hamid has said
The Fall by Albert Camus served as his model.) According to one commentator, because of this technique:
maybe we the readers are the ones who jump to conclusions; maybe the book is intended as a Rorschach to reflect back our unconscious assumptions. In our not knowing lies the novel's suspense... Hamid literally leaves us at the end in a kind of alley, the story suddenly suspended; it's even possible that some act of violence might occur. But more likely, we are left holding the bag of conflicting worldviews. We're left to ponder the symbolism of Changez having been caught up in the game of symbolism...a game we ourselves have been known to play.
In an interview in May 2007, Hamid said of the brevity of
The Reluctant Fundamentalist: "I’d rather people read my book twice than only half-way through."
Hamid has also written on politics, art, literature, travel, and other topics. His journalism, essays, and stories have appeared in
Time,
The Guardian,
Dawn,
The New York Times,
The Washington Post,
The International Herald Tribune, the
Paris Review, and other publications.
