The novelist Mohsin Hamid grew up in Lahore, Pakistan and came to the U.S. to attend college at Princeton, then law school at Harvard, where, he once confessed in an interview, he became bored. Turning to writing, while also working as a management consultant to pay off student loans, Mohsin published his first novel, Moth Smoke (Picador), in 2000. Moth Smoke was greeted with international excitement over the debut of an inventive new voice in contemporary literature. In the New York Review of Books, the novelist Anita Desai wrote of the "clearsightedness of his look at the power structure of a society that has shifted from the old feudalism, based on birth, to the new Pakistani feudalism based on wealth." His new novel, The Reluctant Fundamentalist (Harcourt), has also attracted international attention, becoming number six on The New York Times bestseller list and finding its way onto bookshelves in 16 languages worldwide.

In addition to writing novels, Mohsin regularly contributes essays and editorials to The New York Times, The Independent, The Guardian, and Time magazine. His political and cultural observations often begin with or refer to moments in his personal life as a way of thinking about citizenship, identity, and democracy.

Mohsin's fiction writing is efficient, fast-paced, and often cinematic in its dialogue and sense of suspense. In both his novels, a strong emotional environment and setting are created by an economic and political situation-- from one of giddiness and danger in Moth Smoke's Lahore, to one of possibility and expansiveness followed by a diseased nostalgia in The Reluctant Fundamentalist's New York. Mohsin explained in an e-mail exchange that economics and business analytics heavily inform his thought and writing. "My father is an economist," he writes, and "I studied a good bit of economics in college [...] As a result, that way of looking at the world is something that comes naturally. More than that, it is one of the dominant ways in which our world is now organized and governed, so as a writer I think it is an important lens for fiction."

This interview took place on a sunny afternoon in April, during Mohsin's single day in New York City from London, where he now lives. He was in the midst of a whirlwind U.S. tour promoting his new novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist, but while he had just visited eight cities in ten days, he seemed as composed and engaged as if he were simply on vacation, visiting his old home. Over lunch, we talked about writing, politics, the danger of nostalgia, and about the experiences, artists, and thinkers who have influenced his work.

Mary Ellen Obias: How did you come to writing, and how did you come to politics? Were the two moments related?

Mohsin Hamid: When I was in college-- I came from Pakistan when I was 18 to go to college at Princeton-- I took a creative writing course shortly after getting there, I think a year or so after I got to Princeton, and I loved it. I started writing about Pakistan. My short stories were always about Pakistan and about Lahore, and in a weird way it was a way to stay connected with Pakistan while I was away. But I just loved the process of writing them, and I began Moth Smoke in my senior year in a long fiction workshop with Toni Morrison at Princeton. I wrote the entire first draft for that class. So I began in an American liberal arts creative writing setting, really, as a writer.

And politics, I think if you grow up in a place like Pakistan you're quite innately political, or a lot of us are, because you feel the impact in your life very strongly. So I grew up in the 80s when General Zia al-Huq was this American dictator, who was supported by America, and his project was to Islamize Pakistan-- sort of the opposite of what the Americans would like our current dictator to do. And so I grew up in this increasingly Islamized, officially Islamized, Pakistan, with all sorts of restrictive rules, and I think that does politicize you. I studied international relations in college, and also creative writing, so in a way they've been part of what I did from the beginning of education really, from higher education.

MEO: It seems like a lot of your writing is about politics in relation to feeling and aspiration and identity. Would you say that your approach to politics has always been about affect?

MH: I think I come at politics less from a sort of theoretical standpoint and more from a "how do I personally feel about things" standpoint. And also because I think that's a more effective way to communicate what you feel about politics anyway. Appealing just to pure ideology very rarely sways anybody. It gets people who agree with you to applaud, and people who disagree with you to sort of say you're wrong. But when you refer to your personal experience and make personal what your politics is, you're in a way more likely to engage in a conversation with people who may not agree with you.

"Countries are like people in a way. They have psyches and they have personalities, and their transformation is like that."

So I think that's part of it. But there was a professor when I was at Princeton called Manfred Halpern, and he used to teach a course called "Personal and Political Transformation," where he argued that the model for how countries change is really how people change. Countries are like people in a way. They have psyches and they have personalities, and their transformation is like that. And people are like countries: they're engaged in all sorts of political activities and whatnot.

And I never took his class, but so many friends of mine did-- I wound up being profoundly influenced by that kind of thought! It just resonated with what I already believed, and articulated better what I was sort of already thinking. So that kind of personal-political combination and similarly fiction and politics combination has always been quite central to how I view things.

MEO: I'd like to ask about your choice of the novel as a form. Your two novels have something theatrical about them. Could you talk a little bit about what the novel grants you uniquely as a form?

MH: The dominant narrative forms right now are obviously cinema and television, so that's how stories are told that reach the most people. And I'm favorably inclined towards both forms: I love movies and I love television. But the difference between a novel and those things is, one: you can do it by yourself, so artistically there's no compromise required. It is your vision and you just do it, so I like that aspect of it. And the second thing is that it's a bit like venture capital for ideas. Movies are big business-- there's a hundred million dollar budget, or even for a small movie a 10 million or 5 million dollar budget, and-- I won't tell you how much I'm paid for my books but it's a hell of a lot less than that! And what it means is that you can get seed money for ideas and narratives, which is at an investment point way below what it would be for a film or a TV narrative. And so you can have much more dangerous and much more experimental and much more provocative narratives, I think, in a way, novels.

And so I think if I pitched to Hollywood, "Hey, I have this idea for this film, it's called 'The Reluctant Fundamentalist' and here's what it's about," it might have taken off, but very likely wouldn't have. And similarly the TV miniseries or the HBO serial would be very tough to pull off, whereas a novel can do that. Also, if I were to make a Pakistani television program about this, there would be a very localized audience for the narrative, whereas this novel is being translated into 16 languages, being published sort of all over the world, and so it magnifies the idea a lot. So I think just the pure economics of novels, and the structure of them being sort of one-person produced, is really exciting to me.

MEO: There's this anecdote I was thinking about recently-- one of my friends took a playwriting workshop with Tony Kushner shortly after the U.S. had invaded Afghanistan, and at this point he had already published his play Homebody, Kabul, so people were raising their hands and asking him to predict what was going to happen next!

The question I want to ask you is something about responsibility and the position you're expected to speak from. How do you navigate the responsibility of sort of being put in the position of speaking on behalf of Pakistan, and all of South Asia and the Middle East, while at the same time your novels also are educating your readership on Pakistani history and culture? What do you feel is your responsibility there?

MH: I don't feel a representational responsibility in my work. I just write about what I know. I've had a very close friend who was a heroin addict; I've grown up with a lot of guys who've done a lot of pot; I know people who've had car accidents and not stopped and not been punished in Pakistan; I know people who've had extra-marital affairs-- and those are the ingredients that make up Moth Smoke, really. And similarly I've gone to Princeton, I've worked in corporate New York; I'm from Pakistan; I've left America, and those are the ingredients that make up The Reluctant Fundamentalist. And, so, neither of those is my story; I'm not the protagonist in either of those two novels, but they're mined very closely from experiences that I've seen or observed or had, and so in a way it's not the sort of capital "R" representation of a culture or a people, but the sort of small "r" representation of what I've seen in the world and what I believe to be true.

What's dangerous I think is when-- and it's something that Asian novelists and South Asian novelists in particular have to be very wary of because there's money out there saying, "try to represent"-- is a disingenuous approach to trying to represent something which is not your personal experience, which can be done successfully but can also be very corrupting as an artist. And the way I avoid that is I try to write books that aren't catering to "Oh here's an outsider trying to understand an insider," but instead is catering to "Here's what I believe to be true," and saying it. It's much more the speaking-truth-to-power approach to writing novels as opposed to excavating terrain that people want to know about.

MEO: I'm really interested in your use of suspense. I was looking at the M.H. Abrams Glossary of Literary Terms, and he defines "suspense" as "A lack of certainty, on the part of the concerned reader, about what is going to happen, especially to characters with whom the reader has established a bond of sympathy."

But it seems like in your novels, suspense operates not so much in terms of what is or is not going to happen, but there's a suspense of judgment. Daru is on trial for a murder that he may or may not have committed, and we don't know what the relationship between Changez and his audience is. Could you talk a little bit about how suspense operates in your work?

MH: I think for me-- I hadn't really thought of it in those terms, but now that you say it I have to agree that suspense is an important part of how I write-- but I think partly it's because for me the seductive and compelling power of narrative is important to how I write. My view very strongly is that nobody owes you a few hours of their time to spend with your book; you have to earn it. And you earn it by stimulating them, which is a combination of pleasure, and interest, and whatever. And so, I'm not of the, sort of... I'll give you an example. In contemporary art, people get paid a lot of money by very few people. And so you can put something on a wall and people will look at it and say, "What the hell is that?" and it doesn't really matter, because the people who determine the value of that piece are not the people who come and look at it on the wall. It's some elite class that determines the value of the piece. The novel form, because it's like movies and television, is determined by thousands, perhaps tens or hundreds or even millions of people-- unlikely in a novel's case, but you know-- up to millions of people, individually contributing small amounts to the purchasing of this novel. It's a more democratic form, and I think you kind of have to try to appeal to people, not just to the arbiters of taste, but to actual readers. And so for me, I kind of write what I'd like to read. And so I'd like to read something that is sophisticated, unflinching, at times painful, shows me something different, but also, is a pleasure-- and I like feeling that plot is pulling me forward. And suspense is that: it's the feeling that the plot has got a grip on you and is taking you forward, and you're sort of like, "What is going to happen to me?"

"I think the important thing is not just to accept that and say, "OK, let's write for the professors and whatnot," it's how do you win over people who don't really read novels, and how do you keep the form alive and vibrant?"

One of the nicest things I ever heard about any of my writing was in Pakistan I went to a high school-- I was giving a lecture in Lahore-- and this kid came up to me and he said "Moth Smoke is my favorite novel," and, that wasn't the nicest thing; it was a nice thing. But then he followed that up with "Well, actually, it's the only novel that I ever finished." Now, you can look at that and say, "What do I care about your opinion; you clearly don't read very much so it should be immaterial to me," but I look at it the opposite way, which is that fiction is not penetrating to you as a reader, and I'm really glad that this one did, because I grew up in a culture, in Pakistan, where people don't read a lot of novels. And I think the important thing is not just to accept that and say, "OK, let's write for the professors and whatnot," it's how do you win over people who don't really read novels, and how do you keep the form alive and vibrant? And so, that comes back to suspense sometimes.

MEO: Memory seems to be a problem in The Reluctant Fundamentalist-- for example for Erica, who has this nostalgia about her boyfriend; for Changez's family in Pakistan, who are attached to their former wealth; and for the whole city of New York after 9/11. And then Juan Bautista talks about memory with relation to identity. Could you talk a little bit about how you see memory functioning in the novel?

MH: This idea of memory and nostalgia is really central to the novel, and I think it is central because for me, nostalgia is a disease that's growing stronger and sort of reaching-- or has reached-- epidemic proportions in the world. Nostalgia is a longing for the past. We have it because in the past, we were younger, and therefore further from death, and therefore life seemed better. It's a basic sort of motivator of why people get nostalgic. But when the world changes more and more rapidly, that sense of the past becomes more and more comforting, and nostalgia grows disproportionately-- or proportional to how quickly the world is changing.

And now the world is changing really fast, and so the appeal of nostalgia is really strong. And the way nostalgia acts on us is in the States you see George W. Bush talking about an Axis of Evil and Islamofascists, and these are terms meant to connote the 1940s and the Second World War, and they talk about a time when America was morally righteous and certain in its place in the world, and seemed very confident. And Osama bin Laden appeals to this medieval-- imagined medieval-- Muslim greatness, and that appeal to the past is exactly the same notion: it's these symbols that are from some time that has gone when we were number one, really. And in Europe they talk about with longing the 60s and 70s, when the European welfare state was at its strongest and had not yet been diluted by all these funny-looking foreigners who'd come and immigrated into Europe.

"Nostalgia in the end is destructive."

And so right now in the world the political ramifications of nostalgia are huge. In the novel, the way I look at it is saying, "What does it mean?" Nostalgia in the end is destructive. This notion of nostalgia is very dangerous because we obviously cannot go back-- not to the 1940s, to the European welfare state of the 60s, or to medieval Islam-- even if we could imagine what those things are, which we kind of can't anymore anyway. So it's a self-indulgent, destructive, and unproductive exercise, this nostalgia. What we have to do is accept moving forward and finding new solutions to the new problems that we've got.

In the novel, basically, everybody and everything is infected by this nostalgia: Erica is obviously infected by this nostalgia, but the whole country of America is infected by this nostalgia. Changez is also infected by nostalgia, because what is it that takes him back home? In a way it's this identity that he had from before. And when he gets back home, what is he? He's somebody who misses his American life and this American woman.

Coupled with that in all of my writing is the notion that memory is not trustworthy. In Moth Smoke everybody is telling you these stories about what happened, but can you believe any of them? And similarly when Changez tells you his story about what happened, can you believe him? Who knows? And so it's the combination of asserting that memory is untrustworthy, and secondly that a life lived in slavery to memory is destructive.

MEO: But then, how do we think about our identity without memory?

MH: It's like anything else, it's not about do we have nostalgia or not have nostalgia. It's at what point does nostalgia become crippling and dangerous. And at what point does memory become so untrustworthy that if we rely on it too much, we're lying to ourselves. In the novel, people push that to extremes. I'm not saying that people shouldn't be at all nostalgic or that memory is irrelevant. But, you know, in the 1990s when I was living in the States, if someone had gotten up, a general, with all these decorations on his chest and started talking about honor and duty and this Axis of Evil and the Islamofascists and this and that, I wouldn't have believed it. It would have seemed so anachronistic, and yet now it's taken for granted. I think it's all very dangerous because you're hearing political appeals that are based on this emotional resonance of memory and nostalgia, overpowering people's common sense.

MEO: A lot of dangerous, nationalist movements are based on the kind of nostalgia you're talking about.

MH: I think so, because why get excited about your identity if it's not under threat?

MEO: For me, visually, as an English speaker, the name Changez has a connotation of change. Did you want to suggest something about change or progress through his name and character?

MH: This is the thing: Changez was not meant to connote changes at all! And I've been horrified that the American and British reviewers have said, "Oh my god, he's so heavy-handed, he called him Changes." I should have seen it coming I guess, but if they had done a little bit more research what they would have found out is that Changez is the Urdu name for Genghis. Genghis Khan as the name for a fundamentalist immediately should throw up a red flag, because Genghis Khan and the Mongols attacked and devastated the Arab Muslim civilization at that time. So Genghis is this profoundly un-fundamentalist-- from an Islamic standpoint-- name. So for Changez both as a young warrior in the corporate culture but also as somebody who doesn't sit comfortably at all with religious fundamentalism, that was what that name was meant to connote. The Changes thing is a complete accident that I just didn't see coming, really.

MEO: After 9/11 in The Reluctant Fundamentalist, "focusing on the fundamentals" at work becomes a way for Changez to move forward in the midst of a nostalgic environment, but he's unable to maintain his compassion for people while working in such a goal-oriented way. Is it really a way for him to move forward, or is "focusing on the fundamentals" meant to be just an illusion of progress?

MH: The thing about it is it's profoundly un-nostalgic. This sort of global capitalism, global corporatism is a profoundly un-nostalgic activity. As such, it does propel things forward. It does have issues; I'm not saying it's a profoundly just or even likable thing. But at least it doesn't suffer from this nostalgia problem that a lot of other things seem to suffer from. What it does suffer from is a lack of empathy for those who are being affected by what it's doing, which is a different problem. But in the case of Changez doing this job, he... It's not even necessarily the case that just because he's a Muslim he feels this way. A liberal arts undergraduate who goes and works for a big corporate firm will likely feel exactly this at some point. My American friends and people who worked for big consulting firms, big investment banks and whatnot-- everybody went through this crisis. "What are we doing, what's the meaning of all this, is this something we want to be doing, is this something we should be doing?" It's the crisis of the sensitive soul in the sort of almost military focus of that particular corporate existence.

So I think this notion of... it's not just the foreigner or the Muslim or the Pakistani in this setting who suddenly recognizes this thing. That exaggerates it and sort of exacerbates it for him, but it's the sensitive soul in this kind of environment who also recognizes this thing. Particularly because the training we get to go into that corporate environment in America is not the training that you would expect. It's not toughen people up and make them up into machines; it's soften them up and sort of sensitize them. You know, they study literature and poetry and history and religion and anthropology, and they go and become investment bankers. It's not that they've been studying just economics; the whole point of an American liberal education is to give you a broader outlook on life, really. And then you go to a task for which a narrow focus is the objective. It's cramming that broad soul into that sort of narrow occupation which is the crisis. And so I think many of us who work in that world are janissaries regardless of where we come from.

MEO: There's a quote I'm reminded of by the Italian revolutionary Antonio Gramsci...

MH: Oh the anarchist, yeah. A terrorist, yeah.

MEO: Oh, really? I don't actually know that much about him.

MH: I think Gramsci was a sort of proletariat type of guy but, anyway, I don't know that much either.

MEO: But he has this aphorism about "Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will." The protagonists in your novel are so disillusioned and depressed and cynical, but at the same time so smart and articulate about the sources of their disillusionment. And I don't feel that your novels are pessimistic in themselves, maybe because they are out there, being read.

MH: Well, people have come to me and said, "Your view's so bleak; where's the optimism, where's the hope?" I think there is hope, but I'm not writing about a political situation that's rosy, so it's not going to end with, you know, "Woo-hoo, it's all good!"

But at the end of Moth Smoke, for example, the character of Mumtaz leaves her husband, leaves her lover, and leaves her son, and goes forth to find her own way. In a way it's a symbol of hope for me. And similarly in The Reluctant Fundamentalist, at the end of the novel, his admission that what he has said in this television interview could possibly have been a suitor's love cry to a distant and missing Erica is that thing. He's still trying to reconnect. And so if you imagine the possibilities in those things, I think there is hope. But it's not an easy hope. A lot of things would have to happen and people would have to get through certain sorts of things.

I think we leave Changez-- depending on... because the thing about both novels is that a lot depends upon how the reader reads them-- but I think we leave Changez at a point where it's unclear what his political trajectory's going to be. He's clearly now missing America; he's clearly now feeling this sort of a thing; and he recognizes that half of himself has been left behind there. What's going to happen in the next five or ten years-- assuming he survives for five or ten years-- unknown, but possibly hopeful.

MEO: It's interesting; it's like the hope is in the uncertainty, or in the honest attempt to figure things out.

MH: Well the uncertainty has within it grains of hope. It doesn't dictate hope, but it allows the possibility of hope. And that's kind of how I feel about the world. I'm hopeful, but I can't say that I necessarily believe that my hopes will come to pass. But I am hopeful that things can get much better.

MEO: It's interesting-- you're pointing to some relationship between nostalgia and certainty.

MH: Well, this uncertainty thing is very important because the attempt to minimize uncertainty is resulting in irrational behavior. You know, we're all going to die; it's just a matter of when, and frightening everybody about the idea that they're going to be killed by terrorists, when it's highly unlikely that that's going to be the case...

"...uncertainty preys on us in a world-- particularly in America-- where we're taught to think that life is inside our control."

There are 42,000 Americans killed in car accidents every year; 3,000 have been killed in Iraq; 3,000 were killed on September 11th, so that's 6,000 over the course of the entire "War on Terror." So what's more likely to kill you, really? Your car. But we've been made to feel like there's some huge probability of a catastrophic terrorist attack, which outweighs those simple facts. And that uncertainty preys on us in a world-- particularly in America-- where we're taught to think that life is inside our control. Through the combination of modern medicine, and the protective power of wealth, we can make life certain, whereas in a way, what one has to accept is, look, it's uncertain. And if it's uncertain, lots of things can get us; let's not overly panic about it; what you have is a blessing; who knows how long it lasts; and in the meantime, behave rationally in a way to deal with the things that could get you. And I think Britain for example is much more in that camp. In Britain the hysteria about terrorism is much less, even though there are many, many more Muslims as a share of the population, I think, in Britain. Just because they've been through terrorism; they've been through the Blitz; they've been through a history where uncertainty is ingrained. And in America there's enormous uncertainty; just firearm related homicide is enormous. But somehow, the uncertainty of this terrorist act has been used to really prey on people's fears. And I think in a way what politicians should be saying is, "Look, life is uncertain; we could all be killed; we just don't think it's likely we're going to be killed by terrorists and therefore, we will respond to them-- we'll just do it in a way that's proportionate to the risk that they pose to us."

MEO: It seems like you're also describing a difference between love and attachment.

MH: Yeah, the other thing that's important is to sort of de-couple these love and attachment notions from one another, because attachment is limited. Even if you love someone, you're likely to die at different times, and you cannot completely possess or control what you love. In fact, doing so could completely destroy the whole point of loving. And so, I think that having sort of unbridled love, but not having unbridled attachment is probably a good thing.

In a market-based system where a price for everything is based on owning that thing, and if you own that thing, that means it's attached to you-- that system breaks down in the real world where things can't be done transactionally, which means that we're not very well-prepared for that. And, part of it is, philosophically, there's an over-attachment to life. Not that we all shouldn't be completely crazy about our own lives-- we should be; it's the only thing we've got. But we have to recognize that we are completely attached to it; it can be separated from us, and then live life with a sense of that. And I think many more traditional cultures do that, and religion used to do that. It prepares you for that notion, and makes you come to accept that notion: that your infinite imagination can become de-coupled from your finite body at some point. And I think modern, increasingly de-religious-- although parts of America are not de-religious at all-- but modern society in the West is having a difficult time trying to figure out what to do with that. What do you replace religions with in a way that people can still have the contentment and acceptance about what's happening in life, but not necessarily in a religious context?

MEO: I guess there's a yoga craze right now.

MH: There's a yoga craze, exactly: people are looking for meaning. But, what's sad is, they're looking for meaning, but their politicians are speaking to them only of fear. And that's the problem. If your great leader says to you, "Look, people, we get the fact that there's huge inequality, and there's lots of risk, and whatever, but what we're going to do is try to make things a little bit less unequal, and also make all of us more comfortable with the risks that there are." It's a profoundly different message from what we're hearing, which is, "We will eliminate that risk, and by the way, forget inequality-- we're not really concerned with it." I mean, is a broken health care system a greater risk to Americans, or terrorism? It depends on what you believe, but it's hard to imagine that the millions of people who die of natural causes every year-- and many of them are preventable causes-- will be outweighed by terrorist acts.

MEO: In that sense it shouldn't depend on what we believe, because statistically, there's proof that the broken healthcare system poses a greater risk..

MH: Yeah, absolutely, but no-- the fear is that what if a terrorist got his hands on an H-bomb, and put one in every big American city and the whole country is wiped out? Yes, that is possible. But what if some virus mutates and wipes out the population through natural causes? That's also possible. It's these extremely low-probability, high-impact events that are the realm of mystical pronouncements by politicians, and how much they dangle those things out there. You know, "The 'terror alert' is elevated today"-- what does that mean? It means be a little more scared that the whole place will be wiped out-- but how scared should we be, and why are we so scared?

MEO: Our broadcast news focuses so much on catastrophe.

MH: Completely. It's like with Pakistan. We have six independent rock music TV channels in Pakistan, and the number one talk show host on Pakistani television is a transvestite, but in America, the media images of Pakistan don't reflect any of that stuff. They're like, "Why don't the moderates in Pakistan speak up?" If you go to Pakistan and turn on the television, that's all you'll see-- I mean, not all you'll see, but the vast majority of what you'll see. It's more, why don't we listen to the moderates over there? And that's the real question I think people need to ask themselves over here. There are a lot of moderates out there. If there weren't so many moderates, we wouldn't be safe. It's not that we have fantastic systems in place to protect everybody, it's that most people don't want to kill anybody else. And that's why in this novel in many ways, it's either a thriller, or just a conversation, depending on what you bring to bear about your assumptions of people. It could be just two guys talking, or it could be "chilling," and "terrifying," as some reviewers have called it.

MEO: Your mention of reviews brings me to something I wanted to ask you. I've noticed that all reviews I've read of your work have been overwhelmingly positive, and I was wondering how or if that affects you, and what your relationship has been to criticism in general.

"You have to have a sense about whether your book is good or bad yourself, and believe in it."

MH: Well, there have been negative reviews as well. There's probably been more good than bad, but you know, reviewers are just readers. There's not that much separating a reviewer from the person on Amazon who buys the book and gives you five stars or three stars. Yes, they can write slightly better; they articulate the reasons for liking a book somewhat better, but they're just a reader. Which is different from, I think, the literary critic, who can take you through the journey of saying, "OK, this is Mohsin's book; here's how it fits into what Mohsin is up to; here's how Mohsin fits into American literature and Pakistani literature, and by the way European literature stretching back 200 years, and these are the trends that are involved and here's how we can read this in light of that vision." That's an interesting context and almost nobody does it anymore. The thing about, "This book has too many flashbacks," or "This character's name is 'Changes,' isn't that heavy-handed"-- I mean, what is that? That's just poor reading, as far as I'm concerned. And the positive reviews are very nice, and one is grateful for them, but I think as a writer you can't take them too seriously, either good or bad. You have to have a sense about whether your book is good or bad yourself, and believe in it. It kind of matters more how readers respond. If readers wind up picking up your book, and not getting at all what you were trying to do, then you can say, "OK, that project didn't work." But if reviewers give you "two thumbs up" or "one-and-a-half thumbs up," it doesn't make any difference. It shouldn't. It just makes a difference to your ego, and that-- of course it does. It hurts when you get a bad review if you read it, but I try not to read my bad reviews if I can avoid them.

MEO: Speaking of literary history, who are some of the writers-- and non-writers-- whose work inspires you?

MH: Well, I read a book by Judith Butler, I think a year or two ago, that made me think a lot. She was talking about America's inability to mourn in the wake of September 11th and resorting instead to anger as the appropriate response, and thereby failing to recognize what unites the angered party with the party they're about to attack, which is that they're all mourning for something. We're in a world of mourning, and if we can't appreciate the mourning that we all should be doing, of course we're going to get angry and all kill each other. And, you know, I'm not doing justice to her argument, but I thought, fantastic, and enormously helpful to me as I thought about these things.

Edward Said, from the standpoint of the role of an intellectual, and sometimes what you have to struggle against to communicate particular types of ideas, and the biases you will encounter, and how important it is to stay outside institutions of power when you're making your critique, not be part of necessarily a political party, or an entity.

From cinema there are lots of people as well. I think Moth Smoke is very influenced by Quentin Tarantino. When I saw Pulp Fiction, and I thought of that way of constructing a narrative, of just how he could break it down and still have it very compelling-- as opposed to I think for me, failed postmodern experiments where the breaking down makes it more boring, or less effective. In that case it actually heightened it, and I thought that was fantastic.

But also art, generally. When I think about myself as a writer, it's a lot easier to think about the evolution of visual artists than it is to think about writers, because it's hard to see how we evolve, writers. But you can see, here's this guy, and he's doing this thing, and then he says, "You know what, the hell with the paintbrush; I'm just going to do this," and you just see a certain momentum of how it transforms itself and what the impulse was and how you find different ways of articulating it. And I think of that for myself in very visual artist kind of ways: what unites what I'm doing? You know, Moth Smoke was multiple narratives; this one isn't multiple narratives; Moth Smoke does take kind of a second-person form of address, where the audience is, in a way, a "you"; that's true of this book as well. Moth Smoke is also one where you're called upon to make a judgment, and you're going to be tricked along the way, and that's true of this one. Moth Smoke functions primarily in the vein of realism, but not entirely, and so does this-- in the sense that this dramatic monologue, three-hour conversation couldn't really happen like this. I mean it could, in a "one-man play" sense. So that sense of realism but not quite, or a realist aesthetic but open to the possibilities of other things.

But then there were things which I didn't want to do, so, Moth Smoke had a much more exuberant prose, and this one I wanted to strip down and make it really, really bare. Not necessarily bare, but just minimal in a way. In Moth Smoke the voice of the main character is much more influenced by sort of American culture and fiction and prose. This time, much less so. It's almost like an effect that you achieve. With an American voice you go for kind of a very contemporary one. With this sort of quasi-European, anglicized voice you go for almost an anachronistic one, one from the past. So this is all part of the palette that you're playing with. And so I think of it sometimes very visually in terms of what's happening. So, in that sense, the visual arts are of interest to me.

But then there are writers, obviously, and there's lots of writers. Camus' The Fall, obviously, a huge influence on this book, but before that, Heart of Darkness is a dramatic monologue, and is just that concept. The Great Gatsby and the American dream, and the failure of the American dream. A lot of African American writing in terms of politics and also cadence in prose, you know, people like Toni Morrison or James Baldwin.

I'm a big fan of Calvino and Tabucchi, who are both Italians with a great minimalist aesthetic, which I find really exciting. And Hemingway, because of his paring things down and making them really spare. Borgés for formal possibilities and how you play with them. Saadat Hasan Manto, an Urdu short story writer in the 30s and 40s, for opening up in my part of the world a very direct and unblinking look at things ranging from prostitution to sex to whatever, half a century ahead of his time. People like that, and lots of others as well.

Mary Ellen Obias manages grant programs for artists and small to mid-sized arts organizations at Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. Her experience in the arts includes fundraising and development for Albany Park Theater Project, an ensemble of teenagers who make plays out of real-life stories from their predominantly immigrant neighborhood in northwestern Chicago, and a program associate position supporting grantmaking in arts and culture at Rockefeller Brothers Fund. Her first love is literature. She received her BA in English and Spanish from Vassar College and completed graduate work in English and Comparative Literature at the University of Chicago.