“Excuse me, sir, but may I be of assistance?”

Perhaps you’ve heard those words – or something like them – as you stood, confused, in the middle of some far-off, foreign market. Perhaps you’ve said something like that yourself to one of our own dazed tourists standing under the giant clock of Pike Place Market. Sure, the place is home to us. But foreign (maybe even a threat?) to someone else.

A stranger offers to help. “Yes. Please!” you reply – all the while thinking a second, unspoken question: “Can you be trusted? Do I dare to put myself in your hands?” In Mohsin Hamid’s captivating new novel, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, the Pakistani narrator easily reads the fear in the face of the American standing in front of a teahouse in Lahore, Pakistan’s second largest city. And so he offers immediate reassurance: “Do not be frightened by my beard: I am a lover of America.”

The narrator’s name is Changez. He is a native of Lahore and a fluent English speaker – the perfect tour guide for the tired, thirsty American whose voice we never hear and whose name we never learn. No, we are in for a different sort of travel experience: throughout the course of this tight, tense novel, we become that man, sitting in a Lahore tea house and listening to Changez tell us the story of his life.

It is the tale of a smart, ambitious Pakistani student who journeys to the United States in the late 1990s to study at Princeton, and who becomes enamored with America in general and with one captivating, melancholy woman in particular. Upon graduating, an American business executive takes Changez under his wing. Changez begins his professional climb as a commercial evaluator with the high-flying firm Underwood Samson.

And then – as we continue to listen to this bearded man’s voice while the daylight fades outside the teahouse – Changez’s own story merges with our history as Americans. He watches the World Trade Towers shiver into dust … and he smiles. And in that smile dwells the contradictions, divided loyalties, and mixed emotions of a world whose relationship to the United States was always more complicated than we chose to admit.

Round about this point in the novel, we begin to wonder just who – or what – is this man who insists on ordering dinner for us … And who is the anonymous American in whose place we nervously sit. Can we trust Changez? Can Changez trust us? As the sky grows dark in Lahore, Changez’s story takes on an ominous tone. His fascination and identification with the U.S. begins to bottom out, and we begin to understand how easy it is for yearning to become anger, and for respect to twist into contempt.

The Reluctant Fundamentalist provides no easy answers to our questions, or solace for our foreboding. Read it once for the gripping narrative, then again for the clues you should have spotted. Of course, by then, perhaps it’s too late for Changez and his new American acquaintance, locked in their conversation like a pair of handcuffed prisoners. For that odd couple, safety may be beside the point. When you can hear the sounds of war for yourself, it’s probably too late to buy your plane ticket home. We’re safe at home in our easy chairs, reading Hamid’s book. Aren’t we?

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