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the complete review - fiction

How to Get Filthy Rich
in Rising Asia

by
Mohsin Hamid

general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author

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Our Assessment:

B : clever approach, often striking writing, but ultimately too thin

See our review for fuller assessment.

  From the Reviews:

• "Hamid’s story is at once fable-like and existential." - Amit Chaudhuri, Financial Times
  
  
• "Some readers might find that the novel trips up from time to time on its own conceits; but it is an addictive, muscular piece of storytelling, and the few moments of clumsiness and archness that Hamid's formal experiments produce are a price well worth paying. (...) This is a tremendous novel: tender, sharp and formally daring, a portal into a fast-moving, vividly realised world." - Theo Tait, The Guardian
  
  
• "Paradoxically, though its form seems designed to distance us from characters’ inner lives, it still manages to draw us in at times. (...) As page-turning as Hamid’s book is, in the end its effect is remarkably similar to that of a self-help book -- glib in tone, forgotten soon after it is put down." - Arifa Akbar, The Independent
  
  
• "How to Get Filthy Rich In Rising Asia turns out to be as much moral fable as it is satire. Fortunately, Hamid makes each mode as fresh as the other." - Hannah Rosefield, New Statesman
  
  
• "What might initially seem like a clumsy narrative technique is actually a device that allows Mr. Hamid to zoom in and out from his hero’s life, as though he were using a telephoto lens (.....) Mr. Hamid has high-frequency radar for status distinctions, and in these pages he provides an acerbic, almost anthropological sense of how bribes and corruption grease the social system in his not-quite-Pakistan. (...) It is a measure of Mr. Hamid’s audacious talents that he manages to make his protagonist’s story work on so many levels." - Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
  
  
• "The marriage of these two curiously compatible genres -- self-help and the old-fashioned bildungs­roman -- is just one of the pleasures of Mohsin Hamid’s shrewd and slippery new novel, a rags-to-riches story that works on a head-splitting number of levels." - Parul Sehgal, The New York Times Book Review
  
  
• "The power of this astounding book, however, doesn't lie primarily in its subject matter but in the intelligence and fearless stylistic choices of the narrative. (...) Though all the characters are clearly individuals with particular traits and quirks, they uniformly lack names. The withholding of names gives the characters archetypal resonance." - Krys Lee, San Francisco Chronicle
  
  
• "Yet the danger of framing a novel in this way is that it may be constricted by the limitations of the genres it seeks to expose. And the truth is that How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, while effective as satire, works less well on the human level. The basic problem is that the generalising tendencies of self-help (a genre whose goal is to suggest that we are basically all the same) rubs up against literature’s need for specificity." - William Skidelsky, The Spectator
  
  
• "This conceit proves an excellent way of approaching an aspirational society, and of suggesting that aspiration is a fundamental part of human nature. It allows Hamid to implicitly pair the trajectory of his hero’s life with the trajectories of millions of other lives. (...) How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia is a vital and affecting portrait of a teeming and globally significant, but largely unrecorded culture. It is a bold formal experiment contained within an elegant novella. It is moving and charming and funny." - Edmund Gordon, The Telegraph
  
  
• "As the novel progresses, the gap between the goal-orientated platitudes espoused by self-help books and You’s specific joys and regrets grows more acute. What could have been a gimmicky device becomes essential to our understanding of the price of You’s success." - Claudia Yusef, The Telegraph
  
  
• "Mr. Hamid's cool, cynical intelligence is everywhere on display, in both the polished veneer of the prose (...) and the insights into the ephemeral nature of new money. The last chapters acutely illustrate how the rewards of a lifetime of labor can vanish overnight. But the author is less assured with a threadbare romance between the upwardly mobile protagonist and another self-made figure from the slums" - Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal
  
  
• "It’s a bizarre amalgam that looks like a parody of the genre from one angle and a melancholy reflection on modern life from another." - Ron Charles, The Washington Post

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

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The complete review's Review:

       How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia is written in the second person -- but its 'you' is no everyman (and certainly not the reader), and so it turns out to be a somewhat limited, and limiting approach. The narrator admits in the opening section: "a self-help book is an oxymoron" and at its playful best Hamid here milks all that is associated with the genre(s) -- self-help and fiction -- to very nice effect; unfortunately he doesn't quite go all-in -- even as he artfully teases along the way:

     None of the foregoing means self-help books are useless. On the contrary, they can be useful indeed. But it does mean that the idea of self in the land of self-help is a slippery one. And slippery can be good. Slippery can be pleasurable. Slippery can provide access to what would chafe if entered dry.

It's in being read that a book becomes a book, and in each of a million different readings a book becomes one of a million different books, just as an egg becomes one of potentially a million different people when it's approached by a hard-swimming and frisky school of sperm.

- M.A.Orthofer, 16 March 2013

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Links:

• Riverhead publicity page
• Hamish Hamilton publicity page
• Penguin India publicity page

• B & N Review
• Bedlamfarm.com
• Bloomberg
• Boston Globe
• Boston Bibliophile
• CounterPunch
• Daily Mail
• Express Tribune
• Financial Times
• The Globe & Mail
• The Guardian
• History News Network
• The Independent
• The Millions
• The National
• New Statesman
• The New York Observer
• New Zealand Listener
• Outlook India
• Publishers Weekly
• San Francisco Chronicle
• The Spectator
• Sunday Guardian
• The Telegraph (1)
• The Telegraph (2)
• Vox
• Wall Street Journal (scroll down for review)
• The Washington Post

• Official site
• Mohsin Hamid at Literature Matters

• The Reluctant Fundamentalist

• See Index of Indian and Pakistani literature

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About the Author:

       Mohsin Hamid was born in Pakistan in 1971. He attended Princeton and Harvard, and now lives in England.

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© 2013 the complete review

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