Amit Chaudhuri writes:

Despite its minute probing into the narrator’s thoughts, this is not a conventional psychological novel; much of its magic – the enchantment and innocence of the relationship, the absolute familiarity and foreignness of America, the fragrant boisterousness and menace of Lahore – hinges on the unsaid. Hamid manages marvellously well in creating a novel that’s rendered entirely in terms of the spoken word, and governed by the shape of what’s evaded or not uttered. Two registers of the word ‘formal’ come to mind as one reads. One has to do with politeness, etiquette, and even over-elaboration and circumlocution. In the book, it has to do with the way in which something spontaneous and immediate, like speech, is constantly qualified by adornment (‘irresistibly refined or oddly anachronistic’, as Changez says while speculating about the qualities in him that Erica might have been drawn to), and comes to seem disorienting and at one remove. The other has to do with Hamid’s own craft and practice, his working within the genre of the novella, James’s ‘blessed nouvelle’, with its unique tensions, restrictions and essential playfulness.

(LRB 4 October 2007)

Hamish Hamilton | hardback 184 pp. |ISBN: 9780241143650