I had out-patient surgery, which was a dream, but the after-effect of the anesthesia was vicious. I could write. I could nap. But I didn’t trust myself on the street. So I reached for the pile of books that had been growing to skyscraper height.
I’m not going to tell you about a single one.
Out in the real America, as I learned from Michael Moore’s Broadway show, “The Terms of My Surrender,” the middle class is so tattered most families don’t have $500 in savings. If a distant family member dies, they can’t afford to fly to the funeral.
And today I read that most middle-class Americans can’t afford a new car — even a stripped-down Toyota.
You’d be aware of none of this if you pick up any of my pile of the season’s “hot” books, which are, without exception, set in the lives of very privileged people. Marriages get excavated. Secrets are revealed. Money isn’t much of an issue.
It was with great relief that I picked up “Exit West,” by Mohsin Hamid, best known for “How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia.” It is short: 230 pages. Just two main characters. Ecstatically reviewed — it’s longlisted for the 2017 Man Booker Prize. And it couldn’t be more “relevant.” [To read an excerpt, click here. To buy the book from Amazon, click here. For Kindle edition, click here.]
Nadia and Saeed live in a country that’s “swollen by refugees but still mostly at peace, or at least not yet openly at war.
|
Nadia and Saeed live in a country that’s “swollen by refugees but still mostly at peace, or at least not yet openly at war.” They’re young professionals, blessedly unaffected by the chaos soon to overtake their lives — their first date is at a Chinese restaurant. Hamid’s gaze is objective to the max:
It might seem odd that in cities teetering at the edge of the abyss young people still go to class — in this case an evening class on corporate identity and product branding — but that is the way of things, with cities as with life, for one moment we are pottering about our errands as usual and the next we are dying, and our eternally impending ending does not put a stop to our transient beginnings and middles until the instant when it does.
There are 65 million stateless people in the world today. Why shouldn’t Nadia and Saeed be among them? [Implied question: Why shouldn’t I? Why shouldn’t you?] Quite soon, it becomes time to leave. When they go, it’s not like those terrifying boat trips across the Mediterranean, with overloaded vessels and incompetent crews and small children washed up, dead, on resort beaches. In a dazzling bit of writing that’s like science fiction, they simply go through doors —“doors that could take you elsewhere, often to places far away, well removed from this deathtrap of a country.”
That’s all the plot you need to know. More to the point, perhaps, is my experience of reading this book: it changed the way I think. I often quote my Buddhist reading: “The ground is not solid.” I mean that in the sense that I no longer trust the economy or government or any infrastructure, that I feel we’re on our own now, that our only useful resource is the support we get and give to friends and lovers and family. But here the ground is really not solid — the entire planet is restless, searching, literally on the move.
“We are all migrants through time,” Hamid writes.
“Exit West” is easily the best novel — the best serious book, with the most compelling plot and characters — I’ve read this year.
__
◊♦◊
◊♦◊
__
Photo credit: Getty Images