As in his fiendishly clever and biting The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Mohsin Hamid's How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia combines extremely lean prose and a wry sense of irony to create a dramatic monologue with a wickedly satirical vision of modern times.
None of the characters are named. The central character--who's writing a self-help book called How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia--gives the other figures in his story simple labels: pretty girl, leader, matriarch, master. His how-to-succeed guide turns out to be exceptionally rich in the savage ironies of poverty. The narrator's brother is slowly killing himself working without a mask as an assistant to a spray painter, while his schoolteacher really wants to be an electricity meter reader, because of the greater prestige, graft opportunities and higher wages.
Starting with a night job as a DVD delivery boy, the narrator makes his way up the economic ladder while courting the girl of his dreams with movie rentals. Hamid can be a biting satirist, but he also knows how to infuse his characters with genuine warmth and pathos, and never reduces them to mere symbols in a brutal capitalist fable.
Hamid's novel is a vision of a new, very modern kind of civilization designed for the have-plentys, where the have-nothings survive amid electrical outages and contaminated water in a society that accepts hugely divergent inequality as normal. Hamid has a vast compassion for the wretched, and his story, horrifying in its casual description of abject lives, is a cry for compassion cloaked in a savage smile. --Nick DiMartino, Nick's Picks, University Book Store, Seattle, Wash.