Filthy rich

How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia is Mohsin Hamid’s third novel. It is published by Penguin, 2013, and it has five pages of endorsements – quotes coming from Philip Pullman, Times Literary Supplement (no author mentioned), Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times, The Economist, and, seemingly the sole representative from rising Asia itself, the Pakistani Herald states, “nothing short of a masterwork. It cannot be recommended highly enough”.

These quotes already tell us something about the success and reach of the book. Literary success is marked by the amount of reviews the book creates from journalists in the US, Europe, Great Britain. Commentary, feedback from where the book is set is of little relevance. Mohsin’s books have been translated into some 20 languages – inclusive of Indonesian, Slovenian and Swedish. How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia  is just over 200 pages, the font is small, but is well spaced; it is a page turner, and is told in the second person throughout. How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, Hamid’s website states, has been listed in 30 ‘best books of the year’ lists. This is popular literary fiction. But, it is also a kind of genre fiction, for its appropriation of the self-help book mannerisms.

Hamid plays with his readers and their expectations of the book. The cover looks like the cover of a book that is usually accompanied by the words ‘now a major motion picture’ (with accompanying portrait of stunning actress and handsome actor). This promises to be a novel of practical and professional value for the earnest reader – rather than merely of being morally and ethically enlightening. The title is seemingly a critique of both the misguided romanticism invested in literature and the misguided practices of uncovering sources to instant wealth.

Modern literature has always been intricately linked to patterns of urbanisation. The modernising, globalising, rapidly changing urban environment makes the literary novel possible. Modern literature without the city seems impossible. As cities change, as trends move in new and varying directions literature reflects these changes. A writer’s thorough engagement with an urban environment maintains his or her relevance to the minds and imagination of his or her readers. Outside of the context of Asian literature, I think of Emile Zola’s The Belly of Paris (Le Ventre de Paris, 1873) and, more recently, Italo Calvino’s short stories and urban folk tales or Teju Cole’s novel, Open City. In the case of Indonesia, Seno Gumira Ajidarma has been prolific in documenting urban life over the last 25  years. As urban forms and social conditions change so does literary (writerly, discursive) practice. An author such as Ajidarma writes to a growing cosmopolitan, educated and curious audience.

Hamid’s novel occupies an ambivalent position in regards to the novelistic form. He applies a form explicitly taken from the self-help genre – i.e. a genre that is overwhelmingly represented in airport bookshops. A kind of book that promises self-indulgence and short term comfort while also literally perpetuating one’s mobility. And at the same time as re-creating this form, so he also conveys a self-reflexive awareness of his own readership and makes references to, perhaps, an outdated perspective on the role of literature. The narrator asks provocatively, “why [...] do you persist in reading that much-praised, breathtakingly boring foreign novel; slogging through page after page after please-make-it-stop page of tar-slow prose and blush-inducing formal conceit, if not out of an impulse to understand distant lands that because of globalization are increasingly affecting life in your own?” (Hamid 2013, p.19)

And, in the subsequent paragraph, “and what of other novels, those which for reasons of plot or language or wisdom or frequent gratuitous and graphic sex you actually enjoy and read with delighted hunger? Surely those too are versions of self-help. At the very least they help you pass the time” (Hamid 2013, p.19). This paragraph appears only a few pages after a graphic sex scene in which the parents of the addressed-reader “seal the deal with sex” (Hamid 2013, p.19) to move to the city.

The novel takes the discourse on Asian cities away from the idea of those who move to cities as being hapless victims of their circumstances and of not knowing what to do when arriving and settling in a city. The “you” of this novel is someone who adapts to his circumstances and works things out for himself. He benefits from luck, he uses his logic, he works hard and he bribes where necessary. His siblings don’t fare as well as he does and as such this novel is balanced. You helps out his family and relatives and in the end they steal from him and leave him. But this is not harped on. It happens, the narrator seems to be asserting. One of the values I’m finding in this novel is that it asserts the position of the newcomer as a potential success story, rather than someone who will cause problems and further take up already precious urban resources.

Mohsin Hamid’s novel also provides succinct characterizations of the urban context of ‘rising Asia’:“your city is not laid out as a single-celled organism, with a wealthy nucleus surrounded by an ooze of slums. It lacks sufficient mass transit to move all of its workers twice daily in the fashion this would require. It also lacks [...] governance powerful enough to dispossess individuals of their property in sufficient numbers. Accordingly, the poor live near the rich. Wealthy neighborhoods are often divided by a single boulevard from factories and markets and graveyards, and those in turn may be separated from the homes of the impoverished only by an open sewer, railroad track , or narrow alley. Your own triangle-shaped community, not atypically, is bounded by all three.” (Hamid, 2013, p.20).

And, later, at the height of our hero’s success: “a limousine whisks you to your hotel, in a prestigious neighborhood, where cluster consulates and the offices of multinationals, united by colonial history and also by relative easy access to naval evacuation should that be required. High in your room, you gaze out at the sea, mesmerizing to you, a man from the far-0ff plains, as you watch its fractured surface catch the light, scattered clouds repixelating its colors while speeding overhead. You nibble on tiny chocolates and an assortment of exotic berries, too delicate though to constitute much of a meal, and think, This must be success.” (Hamid, 2013, p.152).

Concluding Observations:

How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia is a bitter sweet slice of modern life.  It is saved from the pitfalls of cloying sentimentality, the arrogance of first world morality and the obscurity of regional parochialism the subject matter may have elicited in a more conventional approach by the forensic skill of Hamid dissection of the modern condition of ‘the rest of the world’.  And we are saved from experiencing the utter brutality of the reality of this condition by a love story that threads its way through the book, its emotional authenticity all the more apparent because of the corruption which surrounds it.  The mechanism that drives this narrative is the idea of the ‘self-help book’.  This works on a number of levels.  It itself allows the reader to collude with the corrupting process of in-authenticity. It provides support for the smug reader in the West by providing a perspective we are familiar with and, thereby, a pathway through what otherwise would seem merely the chaos of a foreign world. 

The novel, in other words, a bridge from our world to that of the anonymous actor; an ethnographic tool, as it were, to help us the reader – rather than being a self-help guide for the anonymous actor.  It is a manual for us to be able to be able to understand – were we that interested – the reality faced by half the world.

The title, How to get filthy rich in rising Asia warns us also that it is of course not a fable.  Stripped to its essentials it is the story of half of humankind which is revealed through Hamid’s lovingly detailed, if bitter observations.  The phantom self-help book is, of course, the all-knowing author, hiding his omnipotence behind this artifice.  In adopting this role, he at once shields us the reader from having to grapple with, or taking responsibility for, a situation which seems unsolvable and overwhelming – it is after all only a novel.