A novel’s empathy-generating success can itself dilute its political specificity.

Evidence

In a certain light, this novel seems an intelligent reworking that broadens the scope and historicizes the story of oppression in Muslim countries. However, it could be argued that its very success as a novel—its ability to move the reader to empathy with familiar forms of human suffering—works to mitigate the specificity of the history it charts. In a sense, the novel must universalize characters’ experiences before it can be sure that they will evoke the required empathy. In the same way, its characteristic polyphony operates as a formal correlative for the inclusivity of both Sufism and Buddhism, the two valorized belief systems recuperable by secular humanism, projected as alternatives to boneheaded Islamic fundamentalism. In the end, is The Wasted Vigil too ready to frame Afghanistan in those approved ways we have already witnessed in The Kite Runner—as an irredeemable blank space of tribalism, brutality, misogyny, and repression? Is the novel’s act of worlding undermined by the manner in which it reinforces and recycles the West’s existing prejudices? — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 416

Categorization

• XREF: Falls squarely on the reader’s contest-vs-quietly-reinforce axis; the empathy-mitigates-specificity mechanism transfers directly to judging Naqvi and Hamid.
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that empathetic universalization is itself a depoliticizing formal demand — that a novel must flatten history before it can move readers — is a genuinely counterintuitive and dense analytic insight the reader will sit with.
• QUESTION: Pursue how far polyphony as form maps onto secular-humanist recuperation — does the same mechanism operate in Hamid’s and Naqvi’s narrative structures?