Mohsin Hamid: How to Interview a Filthily Talented Author About a Book About Rising Asia

Meet Mohsin Hamid, the author of the self-help satire How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, a book about a man who moves from the countryside to the big city to make his fortune.

Hamid, using 'you' to tell an everyman tale of hard work, adversity, graft, love and violence, has opened the doors on the world's newest economic superpower and the people who make the country what it is.

Hamid last impressed six years ago with his Booker-shortlisted The Reluctant Fundamentalist and before that with the taut heroin thriller, Moth Smoke. He is a writer who wrestles with big ideas in an unashamedly accessible way and therein lies his strength. With the new book out now and the film adaptation of The Reluctant Fundamentalist due out this year, Nikesh decided to interview Mohsin Hamid in the style of his new book, a series of self-help instructions. So we give you... how to interview a filthily-talented author about his book about rising Asia...

1.    Ask how he is.

Pretty good. Tired. When a book comes out, you've been waiting six years and you hope it doesn't just die. It's a relief when it doesn't.

You started the book six years ago? Have you just been working on this or other things too?

I'm a very lazy person. I procrastinate like a fiend. There have been periods when I wasn't writing it. It's not like other jobs. You know this, you're a writer. When I'm focused on a draft, I get up early, I write 8am-1pm every day. And some times I need to be away from it. A week, a month.

You are the vessel out of which the story must come. It's funny to think that part of our job involves thinking…

You are the vessel out of which the story must come. You have to keep the vessel alive and stimulated. You have to live your life, in other words. Writing is being alone. Too much of that solitude eats you up. For me, it's important to go out into the world as well.

Being someone who's recently embraced Twitter and, unfairly I think, been chastised for how you use what's essentially a promotional tool, what else do you do to procrastinate, besides Twitter.

Like most people, I waste my time surfing the web. I read various news articles that lead to something else. I walk a lot. I have two kids. I spend a lot of time with my two kids, my wife and my parents.

2.    Clarify whether the authors deems himself to be a citizen of this rising Asia that he sees as 'rising'. 

On the one hand, there's no doubt that the size of the Asian economy is increasing. So in that way, it is rising. But it's also partly a joke, the idea of a 'rising Asia'. Asia's 3 billion people: some of them are doing better, some worse, some are doing fantastically, some of them are in bad shape. It was more intended to trigger a reaction, to say we're going to talk about the rising economy of Asia rather than to assert that Asia is rising.

I think you think up-end the reader's expectations by not talking about your narrator as someone who has much to do with Asia as an external power. It's a very domestic tale.

I was trying to find universal stuff. I was saying, 'look around me at all these people. They're not exotic or funky. They're just universal humans'. I thought, I'm going to Lahore - the city's nameless in the novel, but when I was writing this, I was writing about the city I was living in - and I thought, why can't Lahore be a global template for a city in the same way as London or New York.

Interestingly, I projected Bombay on to the nameless city, because I'm more familiar with it. 

Exactly. It can be Bombay. It can be Lagos. It can be Bangkok. It's any of these cities that are still majority poor but has lots of wealthy people, and has millions of people coming in from the countryside. So many people make that move. It's about that. So, it was an attempt to look for universal things instead of showing a place that's weird and strange and exotic.

3.    Clarify the author's position on self-help novels. 

The self-help form is a narcissistic form.I've never read a self-help book but every magazine and newspaper is full of self-help. How to live to 100, how to have 6-pack abs, how to curl a ball into the far corner of the net, how to make her cry out for more - it's continuously in the ether. If you go into a bookshop in Pakistan or India or Indonesia, it's full of self-help books. I thought, is it maybe that novels are self-help books? Like, if I don't write down what happens to me, I might become miserable so maybe I am helping myself. And when I'm reading, maybe again, I'm helping myself in a way. It started out as a joke but when I began to play with it, I began to feel quite earnest about it. The self-help form is a narcissistic form. I was interested in self-mitigation - having to be less up yourself.

There are moments in the book where I did wonder how you managed to keep the conceit up. Did you know who this narrator was? If you personified him, gave a name and how you kept all those details from the reader to keep him archetypal?

I wanted him to be a character that stuff happens to. I wanted the reader to fill in the holes in this novel with their own feelings, their own details. If I gave the narrator's parents the names of my parents, let's say… they would just be two names to you. But if I say your mother and your father, they bring with them your feelings towards your actual mother and your actual father. So it was a way of telling a traditional story in a way that blurs and leeches into the reader's character at the same time.

There are ultimately no surprises in the book because you lay out your stall early on. Everything is foreshadowed in the chapter headings. This is how it will pan out. Even then, you're asking the reader to fill in those gaps for where they think it's going given where you point them to. 

4.    Satisfy your own curiosity about the 'everyman' nature of the author's protagonist.

The nameless protagonist is an everyman and an everywoman. The nameless protagonist comes alive when they're read. Each reader will animate this protagonist differently. The protagonist that you, Nikesh, animate when you read this book will be different to the 'you' my wife animates when she reads the book. There's enough ambiguity around it. We sample twelve moments in a life and the rest isn't touched upon. Those gaps, the reader fills in.

5.    Question the author's tone. Is it satire? 

I wanted to write a soft and gentle earnest book. I wanted to write a soft and gentle earnest book. And I couldn't figure out how to have a soft and earnest relationship with a reader I didn't know. And I realised the best way was by beginning with the most distancing thing I could imagine: cynicism, brutality, satire, etc. But as you get to know me and I get to know you and the relationship develops over the course of the book, something else starts to happen. So it is a satire, but only like that guy who's always joking around because he's a little shy. And after you get to know him, you find something else there. The satire isn't the end-of… the ending isn't a joke. Satire is a way for the relationship to become natural. Because if you insist on intimacy with someone you're not intimate with, it's phony.

There is a sweet love story at the heart of the book. And it comes a little out of leftfield giving the grand opening and the way the book is constructed. 

Exactly. That's exactly my point.

6.     Dwell on past successes and the ensuing pressures they created.

What's the purpose of writing?It's been six years since The Reluctant Fundamentalist. You started off with this taught thriller before moving on to something personal, sombre and filled with ideas, to now, this satirical everyman love story. What is the plan? 

I have no plan. What's the purpose of writing? It's a quest. You're baffled by the universe so you write some stuff to feel better. There's no point chewing through what you've already chewed there. There's stuff you haven't yet chewed through still. When I wrote Moth Smoke, I was a young guy living abroad. I was still fresh from home. The Reluctant Fundamentalist was from my time living in New York and then moving away. Now, I'm in my 40s, I'm a dad and I live with my parents. I see three generations living together. I wanted to write something that included childhood, old age and the full arc of life, something that touched upon love and what it can do. In a more gentle way than before, but equally desperate, because as a father, I worry about my kids. Those were the sentiments on my mind.

Each book is an expression of the questions that are eating me up at that moment in those years. The questions keep changing so the books keep changing.

That age-old adage 'write what you know…', I always feel like it needs to be more specific. It needs to be 'write what you don't know about what you know…' 

I agree. As far as writing what you know. I don't know if it's because I'm older and I know a bit more, or I'm a father and I can see a bit more…

Or that you had a career before you started writing…

That too, but I think I now finally feel comfortable to go to places I don't know, to live lives I haven't lived, to escape from a mono-generation of respecting people around my age and my socio-economic circumstances, and just go to the human. I guess it's taken me 20 years of writing novels to feel comfortable doing that.

The whole point of writing is that we don't accept there are any rules. That's why we make stuff up. If we believed in rules, we wouldn't be writing in the first place.

In a sense, they're manifestations of a different time in my life.Do you look back at Moth Smoke and think about how you would do it now?

It was written by a different me. I can't be the 28-year-old me when that book was published. That's his book. I don't own that book. It belongs to a younger person who happens to have my name and my genetic code. Same with The Reluctant Fundamentalist. I couldn't write that book now if I set out to do it. I'd write a different book. In a sense, they're manifestations of a different time in my life. I don't feel ownership of them. They're like kids. I have a son and a daughter. They're from me but I don't own them. They're their own things. If I were to shape them, I might shape them differently. I like who they are.

Novels change, in a weird way. The words don't change. Moth Smoke today, 13 years after it was published, is a different book to what it was in 2000 and depending on the reader reading it. Russell Banks once told me, 'You have no idea what your books did till ten years after they're published'. I like that longterm view. The nice thing about writing, and art in general, is you make something and you put it into the world, and it's not yours anymore.

7.    Canvas opinion about the relationship between films and books 

Next month, we have the film version of The Reluctant Fundamentalist arriving on our screens. What do you think?

It's its own thing. Obviously, it's inspired by the book. I don't want to write novels that are movies on a page. I want to write books that are bookish, that do things only books can do… that's different to looking at a screen and looking at a representation of a world that looks like the world in front of you. They're totally different things. For me, the main thing was that the film stand on its own, but that it have a political sensibility I was comfortable with, that it have an aesthetic sensibility I felt was strong and that it mean something. It is those things.

There are important differences between the two. And the movie can do something the book can never do: it can bring people together, an Indian film-maker taking a Pakistani's novel and giving it to a British Asian lead, supported by A-list Hollywood stars. On the other hand, the book can do things the film can't do. It can say, here's a completely ambiguous situation - how does it make you feel? How do you react to it?

A novel is like a screenplay. The reader is the director and the cinematographer…Film adaptations tend to come from a place of honourable failure because they're stripping away any ambiguity that lies in a novel, mostly by fixing it in a time, space and actor/actress. The best adaptations tend to be the ones that purposefully try and do something the book doesn't, or create their own stylistic sensibilities. 

A novel is like a screenplay. The reader is the director and the cinematographer…

And sometimes, if they're big-headed, the actor… 

Yes! And casting agent and soundtrack picker. But in a movie, someone else has done all those things for you. Which is great. But it's not the same. You aren't an audience member when you read a book. You're a director.

8.     Research the author's current reading pile.

There's a book calling Lighning Rods…

One of the funniest books I've read in years…

I'm reading it now. It's weird…

But funny… 

Yes. So funny. And out there. Way out there. If a man had wrote it, you'd be like, you misogynist a**hole! A brilliant capitalist parable, such a good corporate satire, really screwed up. It's just fresh. I'm enjoying it. And I'm reading Katherine Boo's Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity. It's tough. But honest.

9.    Make tentative enquiries as the author's current projects 

I don't know. Every 2-3 days, I keep emailing myself ideas for a book. I have half a notebook of ideas. Just stuff at the moment. Sometimes I think sci-fi, sometimes I think children's book, sometimes I think short story collection, memoir. I've been in a relationship with this book for six years, and now I'm single. So at the moment, it's like every night, I'm with somebody new. And everyday, I'm playing around with the idea of who I'm going to spend the next six or seven years with.

Mohsin Hamid online

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