Gradually the self-help concept begins to jar, and the omniscient tone sounds increasingly grating.

The langauge is lean, witty, and begins by hitting just the right note of breezy pastiche. It is this daringly original narrative conceit that simultaneously launches us into the drama and distances us emotionally from its characters. Neither is the country or city he lives in nor his wife or son, who are all referred to in generic terms – his lover is always “the pretty girl” no matter how old she grows. Written as a self-help book, he addresses his protagonist as ‘you’. Like Hamid’s previous novels, this too is narratively unconventional. If the story is slightly overfamiliar, the way it is told is most certainly not. To this end, she could be Daisy to his Jay Gatsby: the yearning for wealth and position is caught up in a yearning for her. Embedded within this tale of smooth self-invention is a not-so-smooth love story: a pretty girl and sometime lover is just out of his reach and the desire to win her over is partly what motivates his upward climb. It intoxicates.Mohsin Hamid’s third novel is a classic rags-to-riches story told in experimental form.Īn Asian boy hailing from the harsh terrain of village life pulls himself up by his bootstraps to become a hotshot water industrialist in the city. It parodies a get-rich-quick book and gestures to a new direction for the novel, all in prose so pure and purposeful it passes straight into the bloodstream. It’s a love story and a study of seismic social change.

(You’re also nine steps from ruin, but we’ll address that in a minute.) The marriage of these two curiously compatible genres - self-help and the old-fashioned bildungsroman - is just one of the pleasures of Mohsin Hamid’s shrewd and slippery new novel, a rags-to-riches story that works on a head-splitting number of levels. You’ll live and what’s more, you’re only seven steps from getting Filthy Rich, according to the narrator. The only remedy at hand is a large white radish, which your mother cooks up in a foul brew.Ĭourage. Once you quit cowering, you’ll be the hero of this novel written in the second person, although there’s nothing remotely heroic about you at the moment you’re so sick you can scarcely speak. “How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia” begins under a bed. Parul Sehgal, New York Times Book Review, March 29, 2014

How to be filthy rich in rising asia