When Mohsin Hamid embarked on an 18-city book tour across the United States, he found readers receptive to his latest novel. It is the story of a young Pakistani Princeton graduate who feels empathy with America, but becomes so disillusioned by the aftermath of the September 11 attacks that he packs up and returns home to the city of Lahore. The response was so strong that Hamid, 36, with only one previous novel, sold close to 100,000 copies of The Reluctant Fundamentalist, enough to propel the book, a work of more literary tone than popular flavor, onto the New York Times best-seller list last spring. Now Hamid is the centre of literary attention in Britain, where the novel is on the short list for the Man Booker Prize to be announced on Tuesday. But while his novel has received critical acclaim in Britain, home to nearly two million Muslims, the commercial reception has been cooler. In a country where people are worried about what has become known as “the enemy within,” sales of a novel that speaks unnervingly to fear and disquiet about Muslims have yet to reach more than several thousand. To Hamid, the contrast is telling of the difference between the United States, and its embrace of newcomers, and Europe, particularly Britain, where immigrants can forever, it seems, be made to feel like outsiders. “Americans are more inclined to think whether you are a Muslim or not, if you speak with an American accent you’re an American,” Hamid said. “In Europe it’s more a question of the tribe,” he added. “In Europe you can be a second or third-generation Turkish-German, and there is still a question whether you are European.” Hamid is well qualified to speak to the differences between the cultures, having spent roughly half his life in the United States. Some of his biography is embedded in his novel’s main character, he says, though definitely not the U-turn against America, a country to which he remains sympathetic. Just a month before September 11, 2001, at age 30, he left New York on a trip to Europe to explore where he belonged, Pakistan or America. Ever since, he has remained based in London. Though he holds a British passport, he says he feels like less than a citizen here. “I’m a British citizen, yet here they refer to me as a Pakistani novelist,” he said. “In America, even though I’ve never had an American passport, I was called a Pakistani-American.”
