The speed with which we race through this arc is both an asset and a failing. ‘Despite all else you have loved,’ he is told at the end. Living a parallel life is a ‘pretty girl’ he once slept with, and their tracks finally reconverge in later life. He studies hard, saves for university, briefly flirts with fundamentalism, sells bootleg bottled water, dresses showily (‘thinking your garb connotes wealth and class’), goes legit, starts a thriving business, moves into utilities, loses his parents, gets married, has a son, gets divorced, gets betrayed. The instructions are laid out chronologically – ‘Move to the City’, ‘Get an Education’, and so on – and our protagonist dutifully follows the prescribed path to filthy riches. Like Lorrie Moore’s collection Self-Help (1985), which also used the second person, Hamid’s novel is written in the form of a self-help manual. But he is also treated with a measure of empathy and, finally, redemption. Along the way, he is mocked by the author for his gaucheness, then his wiliness and misplaced priorities. Hamid’s unnamed ‘you’ is an archetype who is born in a village somewhere in the subcontinent and goes on to make a fortune.
Mohsin Hamid uses it for similar reasons in How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, a contemporary parable about poverty, capitalism and happiness. Jay McInerney employed this technique in Bright Lights, Big City (1984) to tell the story of an unpleasant, unnamed city boy sucked into the maelstrom of New York yuppiedom. On the surface, the reader appears to be implicated in the story in reality, we are stuck outside, eavesdropping on the author as he hectors his creations with the accusatory pronoun ‘you’. The second-person voice, that rarest of literary modes, can be used to create a false intimacy.
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