Focusing on Fundamentalism: The Triumph of Ambivalence in Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist

The fellow novelist Robin Yassin-Kassab extols the merits of Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist and describes the novel as "the most successful recent novel born out of a desire for dialogue post-9/11". While the initial responses to the terrorist attacks of Sep 11, 2001 in fiction were confined to "trauma narratives" and "Muslim misery memoires", Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist portrays "a sly intervention that destabilizes the dominant categories of the post-9/11 novel, undercutting the impulse to national normalization through the experience of its protagonist". Defining trauma as “a recalibration of feeling so violent and radical that it resists and compels memory, generating stories that cannot, yet must, be told”, Richard Gray complains about a spate of the representations of trauma in fictional rhetoric in his “Open Doors, Closed Minds: American Prose Writing at a Time of Crisis”.