Helping the novel: Neoliberalism,self-help,and the narrating of the self in Mohsin Hamid’s How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia

Abstract

Self-help books sell the myth of self-determinism, empowerment and the eternal hope of reinvention, reasons no doubt for their enormous popularity. In this article, I examine Pakistani-born Mohsin Hamid’s latest novel, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia (2013) which, with its catchy, hyperbolic title signalling its masquerade as a self-help book, openly and ironically advertises itself as a satire. The object of the novel’s satire is the capitalist, neoliberal notion of the self that is predicated on an overweening sense of control and complete agency. Neoliberal subjectivity endorses the care and transformation of the self in order to take best advantage of a market economy, since the means to achieving material affluence is seen simply as a matter of individual choice and personal will. In the novel, Hamid brings into productive tension the conventions and assumptions of the self-help genre with those of the more traditional realist novel in order to interrogate not just the neoliberal self but the very ways in which the self is narrated and constructed. Engaging in particular with the affordances of technology in his novel as a thematic, Hamid appropriates the vantage points and perspectival positions made possible by modern technology to undermine the solipsistic self of the self-help book. He further exploits the narrative energies of the novel form to foreground a sense of historical contingency to lay bare various modes of self-constitution and self-narration. Through his use of metatextual narrative strategies, Hamid raises fundamental questions about the genre of the novel itself and the ways in which it is intimately invested in the insinuation of the development of a self. These questions, I argue, ultimately underline his affirmation of the novel’s important place and the ethical role it can play at this contemporary moment of late and global capitalism.

In “The Art of Becoming Rich”, Li Ka-Shing, the richest man in Asia, offers some tips about how to accumulate wealth, emphasizing the point that “Life can be designed. Careers can be planned. Happiness can be prepared” (2014: R1). Li’s confident assertion is the underlying assumption of self-help culture in a capitalist society. Self-help books — together with the panoply of promotional videos, workshops, and seminars which complete the industry package — sell the myth of self-determinism, empowerment and the eternal hope of reinvention, reasons no doubt for their enormous popularity. In this article, I examine Pakistani-born Mohsin Hamid’s latest novel, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia (2013) which, with its catchy, hyperbolic title signalling its masquerade as a self-help book, openly and ironically advertises its satiric intent. The object of the novel’s satire is the capitalist, neoliberal notion of the self that is predicated on an overweening sense of control and ultimate agency. Neoliberalism, according to Rosalind Gill, is “structured by a current of individualism that has almost entirely replaced notions of the social or political, or any idea of the individual as subject to pressures, constraints or influence from outside themselves” (2008: 443). Neoliberal subjectivity endorses the care and transformation of the self in order to take best advantage of a market economy. With material affluence as the goal, the means to achieving that is often seen as simply a matter of individual choice and personal will — to be entrepreneurial and enterprising, for example — rather than any advantage one might attribute to traditional indices of identity like race, ethnicity, gender, or family background.

Like his two earlier novels Moth Smoke (2000) and The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007), Hamid’s third novel tackles the issue of economic disparity and inequality in global capitalist societies. In How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, Hamid brings into play and into productive tension the conventions and assumptions of the self-help genre and those of the realist novel in order to examine not just the neoliberal self, but metafictionally the very ways in which the self may be constructed. Engaging in particular with the affordances of technology in his novel as a thematic, Hamid deconstructs the idea of the self and lays bare various processes of self-constitution and self-narration. He appropriates the particular vantage points and perspectival positions made possible by modern technology to undermine the sense of a self in complete control. Instead of the solipsistic self of the self-help book, Hamid presents the self in the novel re-imagined through connection and relationships, and irrevocably and always already plugged into multiple communities. At the same time, he lashes the immediacy of the self-help genre to the narrative energies and temporal possibilities of the novel form in order to foreground a sense of historical contingency and the provisional forces that buffet and inform the self. In metatextual fashion, he thus raises fundamental questions about the novel form, ultimately as part of his affirmation of the ethical role the novel can play in this historical moment of late and global capitalism.

The specific achievement of Hamid’s novel owes a debt to the long history of the relationship between the self-help book and the realist novel in British literary tradition. In 1859, Samuel Smiles published Self-Help; with Illustrations of Character and Conduct, the original book which gave the genre of self-improvement literature its name, although the lineaments of the form could arguably be traced earlier in conduct literature. Self-Help proved immensely popular with a rising Victorian middle class with aspirations to increased status and socio-economic dominance. The book provided examples of individual and invariably male success in industry, commerce, politics, government, engineering, science, and exploration to demonstrate how self-reliance, hard work, and self-discipline were a sure recipe for advancement. Smiles advocated an individualism sans government, institutionalized structures, and other forms of sociality, mixing uplift and moral probity with the promise of success. His message was Christian, nationalistic and imperialist in its celebration of English character and inventiveness. With its “can-do” emphasis, it signalled a dismissal of those born into privilege and allowed the middle class to see themselves as the new leaders of the British imperial nation. In offering his readers “lessons of industry, perseverance, and self-culture” (1859: vi), Smiles recognized the power of story to achieve his didactic purpose, hence his reliance on biographical detail and narrative in his “illustrative sketches of character” (1859: vi). However, Self-Help was not the only work that testified to England’s intense cultural interest in how to get ahead in an age of capitalism and expansion. Dinah Craik’s enormously popular novel, John Halifax, Gentleman, published earlier in 1856, showed the porousness of the boundary between self-help book and novel with its obvious didacticism and moralistic intent woven into the fabric of its narrative. At the other end of the spectrum, illustrating the aesthetic potential of the novel form is Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations (1860). Probably the most significant novel of the period about social mobility and published a year after Self-Help, Dickens’ novel brings home in a subtly and morally complex way the cost of material and social advancement. Indeed, as Bruce Robbins argues, the novel’s very literariness is assured “by virtue of the severe disciplining it administers to simple wish-fulfilment” (2006: 429). How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia may be seen as re-staging in effect the tension between individual desire and social good for the global moment today.

With its delineation of concrete steps and actions for self-transformation, the self-help book may be seen to belong to what Michel Foucault in his exploratory examination of how individuals become subjects has called “technologies of the self”. These are real practices that

permit individuals to effect by their own means or with the help of others a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thought, conduct and way of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection or immortality. (1988: 18)

Foucault suggests with this term that the self is constituted, not just discursively, but through various practices and techniques including, for example, the habit of writing in a diary as part of a process of self-examination. Reading a self-help book then may be seen as yet another way of participating in self-constitution. Although self-help celebrates and promotes an atomistic individualism, part of its appeal is its ostensibly democratic nature, since the author–narrator is dispensing advice potentially to anyone and everyone. The promise of an improved self and a better life is open to all who can and care to read the book. If Smiles’s suggestions for self-improvement are inextricably linked to its nineteenth-century moment of imperialist nationalism and industrial capitalist expansion, the contemporary notion of self-help in this intensified moment of late global capitalism finds perhaps its best embodiment in the idea of radical transformation or the makeover, a standard feature of today’s chat show programmes and reality TV. How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia fuses the conventional rags to riches story and its predictable narrative pattern with the immediacy and yet future-orientation of the self-help book, disclosing both the self-help book and the novel as competing technologies of the self.

In the novel, Hamid identifies a rapidly-developing, booming “Asia” — South Asia and Pakistan in particular — with its large aspirational population, growing consumption, changing tastes, excessive capital, and seemingly endless business opportunities, as the new site of capitalist fantasies. ¹ The novel traces the rise of its main protagonist “you” who is otherwise unnamed, just like all the other characters in the narrative. “You” is the ambitious third child of a poor family who migrates with his parents and siblings to an unspecified city for a better life and rises up the economic and social ladder through his water supply business to achieve material success. Instead of a bildungsroman narrated in the third or first person that one might expect from such a story, we encounter instead a dramatic monologue. The narrator, while not coincident with the author “Mohsin Hamid”, is represented as the persona of a writer of a self-help book who is actually writing a novel. The one-sided narrative employs the second person pronoun “you”, interpellating the reader as the reader of a self-help book. Thus “you” refers to both the reader and a character in the text, resulting in a different inflection of the more orthodox triangulated relationship of narrator–reader–character as the reader is denied the safety of distance, becoming as well the conjoined object of satire.

In the novel, the choice of water as the commodity with which the protagonist makes his money is not accidental, given that water is symbolically significant on so many levels. In the “rising Asia” of the novel, unequal access to water strikingly reveals the gap between the rich and the poor. Those who can afford it buy bottled water rather than drink the sewage-contaminated water from the city’s network of pipes and taps. “You” first enters this market the only way he can — by supplying fraudulent bottled water. As a scarce and precious commodity the provision of which the state is content to outsource to third-party private companies, water also stands as a potent symbolic reminder of market-based policies and neoliberal ideology’s reach. At the same time, water calls to mind Zygmunt Bauman’s notion of “liquid modernity” to describe the historical moment of late capitalism which privileges movement, change, mutability, and lightness (2000: 120). In the novel, the overriding sense of a liquid modernity at work is evident from the way material and social success means having the ability to be flexible, fluid, and changeable as flowing water. The protagonist expands his business from selling bottled water of dubious quality to securing a licence as a municipal vendor of water, navigating in the process threats from competitors and a corrupt state bureaucracy, before finally leveraging on debt in order to scale up and dominate the water market. For that last step, the protagonist’s “business is quantified, digitized, and jacked into a global network of finance, [his] activities subsumed with barely a ripple in a collective mathematical pool of ever-changing current and future cash flows” (Hamid, 2013: 183). ² With each change, he is thus further removed from his fixed business and drawn deeper into a fluid insubstantial world of financial flows and capital circulation. Like the water he must keep flowing, excess capital always needs new areas of investment and markets in which to circulate.

As his water business booms following his initial successes, the protagonist joins the burgeoning middle and upper classes: he buys a house, marries, and starts a family. His wife is young, beautiful, educated and, initially at least, attracted to him. But success proves unsustainable and eventually both his marriage and his commercial empire crumble. The latter occurs when he is cheated by his deputy who happens to be his brother-in-law. The rise and fall plot, such as it is, is straightforward enough. At the novel’s emotional centre however, is the love story between “you” and another character called “the pretty girl”, his first, and as it turns out, only love. The relationship between the two is kindled when the protagonist is asked by the pretty girl to supply her with a constant stream of pirated DVD movies which serve as both escapist fantasy and a form of education for her. Their romance is, for a large part of their lives, a long-distance one. As a constant reference point, it serves to provide in the novel some measure of narrative equilibrium to counter the main upward mobility story. Just as “you” moves up the social and economic ladder, so does the pretty girl, except that the latter achieves this by capitalizing on her physical attractiveness to claw her way out of poverty. The pretty girl’s simultaneously unfolding life — first as a model, then a celebrity chef and finally a boutique-owner — is glimpsed, surmised, and pieced together by “you” through chance encounters, media coverage, and snatches of information from various sources. The use of “you” and “the pretty girl” instead of specific names to refer to the characters lends an allegorical quality to the novel as both are cast in a position of Everyman and Everywoman, respectively, and their love story assumes a translocal if not universal dimension. ³ The device also allows Hamid to interrupt linearity and the cumulative sense of the self, if only momentarily and wistfully, since the pretty girl is always that even when she is 80. The implicit desire to render time still is apparent too, when the pretty girl runs into “you” as a young man just starting out in business and then later as an old man, uttering in both instances, the same line, “Is that you?” (209).

From the beginning of the novel, the narrator speaks directly to the reader in a tone that is by turns familiar, humorous, teasing, facetious, and insinuating. The unnamed narrator begins his narrative forcibly, without mincing his words: “Look, unless you’re writing one, a self-help book is an oxymoron” (3). The line immediately announces the act of writing in a self-reflexive way and the next few lines proceed to hail the reader as the reader of a self-help book while at the same time ironically questioning the efficacy of such books and such reading. Each chapter in the novel is framed as a chapter in a self-help book (e.g., “Get an Education”, “Don’t Fall in Love”, “Work for Yourself”) and organized as a logical sequence of practical steps one needs to take to become “filthy rich”. In addressing the reader rhetorically, the narrator is often unabashedly open about the relationship between the self-help book and the novel, noting, “Indeed, all books, each and every book ever written, could be said to be offered to the reader as a form of self-help” (20). Even as the narrator dissolves the boundary between novel and self-help in a tongue-in-cheek fashion here, it is clear that the novel is different, not least because it foregrounds a blind spot of the self-help book — that not everyone can possibly succeed in life and that many will be left behind. This we see in the narrative fates of “you”’s parents, brother, and sister, who die horrible deaths before their time in the novel because, unlike “you”, they could not completely wrest themselves from the grip of poverty and its long-lasting effects.

The use of the second person pronoun in the text has several implications for the constitution of the self. As mentioned earlier, “you” is at once the reader and the main protagonist in the novel. “You” as a character with specific traits and a sense of personality occurs through the accumulation of time and narrative. The “you” in the novel is, to use a word the narrator plays with in the first few pages of the novel, “slippery”; it allows for a slippage between reader and protagonist as well as a conflation of the two in a way that an autodiegetic “I” cannot effect. Mimicking the style of self-help books as well as distantly echoing create-your-own-adventure fiction, the text constructs “you” as reader and character. Both enjoy a fluid, complicitous relationship akin to that shared between narrator and character in free indirect discourse. With the use of “you”, the reader is button-holed and corralled, implicated in everything that happens in the novel given the coercive, interpellative power of that rhetorical act. Thus the reader is drawn into the very act of murder, for example, when the protagonist, threatened by a business rival for encroaching on the latter’s territory, engages a bodyguard who kills his would-be assassin, the “boyish gunman” (133). The murder is especially chilling because the gunman, with “his voice high-pitched, almost prepubescent” (123), could very well have been the protagonist when younger. Like the protagonist, he was just another boy trying to get ahead in the city.

The changing use of different pronouns as “you” gives way to “I” and “we” in the novel is significant once the veneer of self-help starts eroding and the novelistic narrative gains further momentum. The emergence of “I” and “we”, pronouns which register more tangibly the narrator’s presence, sets the stage for a more reciprocal relationship between narrator and reader to be established. Thus, in a chapter where he contemplates his characters in an urban high-tech reality, Hamid writes, “We’re all information, all of us, whether readers or writers, you or I” (159). This seemingly equal and equalizing relationship is further anchored when the self-interest of the “I” is disclosed. The narrator confesses to wanting to carry on “offering, through economic advice, help to two selves, one of them yours, the other mine” (201). The writer and reader are woven into a relationship from which they cannot be disentangled and the illusion of full agency on the writer’s part is ruptured once the role of the reader as essentially co-author in making the narrative work is acknowledged: “As you create this story and I create this story, I would like to ask you how things were” (220). Yet, even as Hamid renders the reader complicit in the action of the novel, he frequently also draws attention to what he does in a way that proclaims the underlying fictionality of it all. Take the start of the novel when the narrator says:

This book is a self-help book. Its objective, as it says on the cover, is to show you how to get filthy rich in rising Asia. And to do that it has to find you, huddled, shivering, on the packed earth under your mother’s cot one cold, dewy morning. Your anguish is the anguish of a boy whose chocolate has been thrown away, whose remote controls are out of batteries, whose scooter is busted, whose new sneakers have been stolen. This is all the more remarkable since you’ve never in your life seen any of these things. (4)

In this instance, the reader is being ushered into the role of the main character but the smoothness of that transition is deliberately unsettled as the narrator draws attention to how the presumably modern, urban, middle-class reader is probably and erroneously imagining “anguish”. The changeability of the narrative voice — its start–stop–restart manner — contributes to the sense of disorientation and the disruption of stable perspective the novel engages in as part of its fundamental critique of the neoliberal self’s (smug) sense of control. Strikingly cinematic in inspiration, the shifts in narrative focus and seamless changes in scene throughout the novel may be seen to serve collectively as a stylistic or technical homology to the various formulations of the self the novel offers as it explores the impact of technology on the self in a contemporary urban capitalist society.

The self as the constant object of surveillance, whether by mechanical devices or the naked eye in the urban modernity the characters inhabit, offers one instance where a change in perspective and a change in self are explicitly linked. The moment occurs relatively early in the novel when we see the relationship between the young “you” and his sister as they indulge in make-believe play by an open sewer. The viewpoint given is that of an all-seeing yet uncomprehending mechanical eye: “Viewing the scene from the lenses of an orbiting reconnaissance satellite, an observer would see two children behaving peculiarly” (27). The satellite serves as a mobile panopticon as a description of the children’s innocent and make-believe play follows. Brother and sister share a rare moment of childhood happiness that is disrupted by the intrusion of another gaze as “a formerly shuttered window” opens and “[a] tall, bald man stands inside, staring at your sister intently” (28). It is an ominous moment as the man’s gaze immediately identifies “your sister” as a girl of marriageable age and one for whom no further formal education would be needed. Even after she has attained enough wealth to protect herself and ensconce herself in a safe physical environment, the pretty girl too is vulnerable to surveillance. In her case, this occurs through her expensive laptop, which is “teeming with digital fauna” (169). A military program installed in the computer allows it to become a monitoring device through the built-in camera and microphone, morphing it possibly into “an originator of voyeuristic striptease and porn” (169). That something or someone is always watching creates an all-enveloping atmosphere of menace in the novel and underscores the difficulty of exerting full control over one’s life.

In another striking example of narrative perspective enabled by technology, which heightens the sense of ominousness in the novel, Hamid uses the device of an unmanned aerial vehicle or drone to emphasize the pervasive reach of surveillance technology and the ubiquity of state power. The drone may be understood as a novelistic chronotope characterizing the everyday time of an urban modernity that puts a premium on information for a variety of purposes including national security. According to Mikhail Bakhtin, a chronotope refers to the “intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature” (1981: 84). Elaborating further, he observes of chronotopicity that “[t]ime, as it were, thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible; likewise, space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot and history” (1981: 84). As the drone traverses geographical space, it can, through its impersonal optic, randomly and momentarily unify disparate individuals and groups. Narratively and symbolically, it can create the impression of a dubious equality among people of shared insignificance and dehumanization as it reinforces the sense of the world as a callous and oppressive place. It is through the unfeeling and unblinking eye of the drone that we learn that the protagonist’s brother has finally died, probably after years of being slowly poisoned in his job as a commercial painter from inhaling paint fumes. At the funeral, the protagonist is not explicitly identified except as a rich-looking man in his sixties wearing a suit, since the reader is being led to view him from the imagined perspective of the inanimate drone. In weeping for his brother, he “looks up to the heavens” (175), a moment that feels so old-fashioned in the context of this hypermodern novel. As if mocking the search for an answer or spiritual solace, we are told that “[t]he drone circles a few times, its high-powered eye unblinking, and flies observantly on” (175). In this moment, Hamid signals the death of older moralities and verities, replaced by advanced if similarly pitiless entities. If in an older dispensation, one railed against fate or God for being indifferent, here, the characters are subject to an implacable eye representing possibly and variously the faceless nation-state, a military–industrial system, and a globalized world united as so many streams of information and so much data to be collected. On the one hand, as the scene also discloses, the shadow of death renders progression and self-improvement perpetually precarious and perilous, even meaningless. On the other, the very notion of a unified self possessing agency is contested as today’s surveillance technology and digital databases deconstruct and reconstruct the self as a provisional agglomeration at any one time of statistical information and data streams.

Besides challenging the unified individualism of the neoliberal self by positing the construction of other protean selves, the novel is also invested in critiquing the self by insisting on the inevitability of connection and dependency. No one, it seems, can ever simply be alone. This is seen most clearly in the moment when “you”’s ascent reaches an abrupt end as his brother-in-law defrauds him and he is hospitalized for a heart attack. In his bedridden state in the intensive care unit of a hospital, he is hooked up to machines and unable to speak, “a kind of cyborg, part man, part machine” (185). Hamid writes:

To be a man whose life requires being plugged into machines, multiple machines, in your case interfaces electrical, gaseous, and liquid, is to experience the shock of an unseen network suddenly made physical, as a fly experiences a cobweb. The inanimate strands that cling to your precariously still-animate form themselves connect to other strands, to the hospital’s power system, its backup generator, its information technology infrastructure, the unit that produces oxygen, the people who refill and circulate the tanks […] and on and on, from your body, into your room, across the building, and out the doors to the world beyond, mirroring in stark exterior reality preexisting and mercifully unconsidered systems within, the veins and nerves and sinews and lymph nodes without which there is no you. (185−6)

In describing the self as such elaborate external and internal network systems, the narrator assumes an almost hyper-omniscient stance. What we have here is a renewed and updated version of the web of interconnected lives George Eliot articulated in Middlemarch (1871), undoubtedly the traditional realist–moral novel par excellence. In Eliot’s novelistic vision, people are caught in a social web, tied to each other by invisible threads in such a way that one’s actions can have incalculable and unknown consequences. Morality consists of the awareness that one’s actions can have multiple repercussions and affect the lives of others even if the novel resolutely diverts the protagonist’s attention and action from a wider to a more circumscribed sphere. Central to this interconnected moral universe then is sympathy, the ability to feel for someone else. In Hamid’s novel, the obverse obtains — part of the moral transformation of the protagonist and the reader must lie in the realization that he is dependent on and connected to others or indeed other machinery, whether he likes it or not. Instead of the self being an agent and the original autonomous source of action, the image of the self presented here is one of helplessness and entrapment by “inanimate strands” over which he has no control. Eliot’s spider web as a metaphor for social connection has been transmogrified into an interlocking web of machines, electrical systems, and of course the World Wide Web itself. Unlike in Middlemarch where the focus remains insistently on the question of what the unified subject can do, the point underscored here is about the need to submit to one’s loss of control. Moral folly in the contemporary moment lies in believing in one’s complete autonomy.

With How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, it is clear that Mohsin Hamid is intent on capturing and reflecting capitalist realities. In this regard, the text may be read as an endorsement of what Mark Fisher has termed “capitalist realism” or “a pervasive atmosphere, conditioning not only the production of culture but also the regulation of work and education, and acting as a kind of invisible barrier constraining thought and action” (2009: 16; emphasis in original). It is “the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it” (2009: 2). Indeed, as Slavoj Žižek and Fredric Jameson have observed elsewhere, it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine a change in capitalism as we know it (Shonkwiler and La Berge, 2013: 2). Yet in deliberately deploying the same term as Fisher, Shonkwiler and La Berge seek to inflect “capitalist realism” differently to include at the same time a reference to the aesthetic project of realism. They ask “how the ‘realism’ that functions as an ideological marker in political and economic discourse relates to the realism of narrative production” (2013: 7). In this way, the reconceived term also aptly captures Hamid’s novelistic project as he attempts to interrogate the seemingly unshakeable nature of a capitalist reality while reflecting on the business of the realist novel. Against the self-evident truths and realities of capitalist societies, Hamid presents what he sees as the essential fundamentals in human existence — life and death. The crucial problem, according to the narrator, is that “time passes” (219); all writers and readers seek in essence a solution to this. And because we are “all refugees from our childhoods”, we “turn, among other things, to stories” (219). The ironic injunction in the novel to “focus on the fundamentals” is borrowed from Hamid’s second novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist where the religious fundamentalism seemingly implied by the book’s title is actually a reference to the bottom-line realities of companies in finance-speak. Hamid appropriates “focus on the fundamentals” from business and corporate discourse to argue instead for an alternative understanding of “fundamentals” as that which should be paramount in human life.

In the last portion of the novel, as “you” and the pretty girl enter the eighth decade of their lives, we see how they are finally reunited after more than half a lifetime spent apart. Free from marital and business attachments, they move in together and enjoy their last years as a couple. They create a world of their own subject to their own personal rhythms and spend their time “by turns cheerfully, grumpily, quietly or comfortingly” (221). Their lives — reduced yet full — appear to reinforce what Simon During has proffered as a kind of private ethical stance against capitalism. During writes about the possibility of developing an “ethic of an asceticism not directed against the body or desire but for lightness and the mundane, as categories that lie, as it were, beneath capitalism’s uses and spectacles” (2010: 160). The joint life of the elderly “you” and the pretty girl represents a withdrawal from capitalism precisely into a diminished and unspectacular existence as the pulsating city in which they live becomes to them “an increasingly mythological space” (223). During argues that “[t]o live on the system’s outer limits is to live ascetically; it is to aestheticize mundane experience; it is to deliver oneself over to temporalities other than those of capitalist production and consumption; it is to acquire the resources from which fully and freely to reflect on a wide range of engagements in the world” (2010: 161). The pretty girl dies first of cancer before “you”, her desire for death likened to a child’s impatience at the “remaining strand of flesh binding a loose milk tooth to its jaw” and her passing described ironically as “a birthing urge” (226). By extending the narrative arc to the moment of death for his two main protagonists, Mohsin Hamid has upset the temporal assumptions of the self-help book and implicitly denigrated the getting and spending, and the circulation of capital that underpin it.

At the same time though, the novel does not just present a simple linear narrative. In the first place, there is no mention of specific historical events that might ground the narrative in any particular period, just a vague sense of the narrative action taking place perhaps in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. That roughly eighty years have passed in the course of the novel is registered through physical descriptions of the protagonists getting older and of the changes affecting the unnamed city “you” lives in. In a critique of the unsustainability of capitalism’s relentless logic of expansion and interminable growth, we are told about how the city is steadily drying up and how the gap between rich and poor is becoming ever more stark as the novel draws to a close. Yet given the absence of specific dates, the reader might be forgiven for imagining that time has not really advanced. Each stage of the protagonist’s life is narrated in the present tense, thus producing a strong sense of immediacy that is further heightened by the direct address to the reader at the start of each chapter, which interrupts the strict chronology of events. The novel achieves an effect in the reading process similar to that of watching a dramatic play where action unfolds in a shared present mediated by the narrator’s dramatic monologue, resulting in a foregrounding of the text’s devised nature and its delight in such fluid temporal devices as the “time ripple” (222). ⁴

As the protagonist draws closer to death at the end, the text stresses the importance of connection and human relationships. In his final moments on a hospital bed, the protagonist is lucid enough to register the presence of his family around him. Assessing “you”’s life, the narrator points out, that in the end, despite everything, the fact remains that he has loved. And the act of having loved implies a certain selflessness; it means that the protagonist has gone “beyond” (228) himself. It is perhaps a rather sentimental assessment of the worth of “you”’s life. Yet by unabashedly presenting it nevertheless, the novel also conveys a vision of contact and connection that is an alternative to the economic connectedness of a global world which only serves to fuel competition. Instead of the chain of transnational capital, for example, we have a grand equalizing gesture at the end as the narrator says:

and the pretty girl holds your hand, and you contain her, and this book, and me writing it, and I too contain you, who may not yet even be born, you inside me inside you, though not in a creepy way, and so may you, may I, may we, so may all of us confront the end. (228)

The lines suggest self-consciously an interconnectedness without beginning or end. The time–space compression expressed by the passage is a refraction and a reworking of globalization’s axiomatic time–space compression in the service of markets and the economy. The connection that is celebrated in this intensified moment is an endorsement not only of the imagination but of the capacity for imagination, which allows us to truly traverse time and space by providing us an experience of sympathy and an occasion for contemplating solidarity. As the narrator observes, “And how strange that when I imagine, I feel. The capacity for empathy is a funny thing” (220).

In mobilizing the discourse of self-help and the stylistic features of that genre, Mohsin Hamid has written a novel of capitalist realism that reflects upon what it means to live in the present historical moment of globalization and neoliberalism. He seeks to affirm the novel as a valid and vital form of cultural and self-expression as How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia raises questions about the fundamental things that novels do — construct both the self and the world as a dialectic between the individual subject and historical forces. The improvement of the self in neoliberal terms, to get “filthy rich”, is shown to be an isolating enterprise fundamentally at odds with the novel genre (and implicitly life), with its connections, misconnections, and multiple ties. A wider point of view afforded by the novel constantly undercuts the tunnel vision of the self-help book with its single-minded focus on the self and perennial future progress. Through its destabilizing narrative techniques, the novel reminds us that the self can be and is in effect many things — a fictional construct of novelistic discourse, a cyborg, a unit of labour, a social being, an amalgamation of physical information, a digital presence — at once much richer and more complex than the questing neoliberal self.