A novel’s intended reading and its actual reception often diverge sharply

Evidence

Hamid is, of course, playing with just such interpretative tendencies in The Reluctant Fundamentalist, reeling in the reader along with Changez’s silent antagonist. Aboulela, conversely, makes a genuine attempt to communicate one particular mode of Muslim subjectivity, albeit with a certain degree of blind faith in the communicative potential of literary fiction. That her novel may signify something else out in the wide world where Muslim religiosity is always seen as potentially suspect does not invalidate the attempt. Indeed, this mismatch between apparent intention and reception is one of the most fascinating aspects of these novels. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 510

Categorization

• XREF: The intention/reception mismatch is a direct reading tool for how The Reluctant Fundamentalist and Naqvi’s Home Boy get received — the hinge between scholarship and story the reader is building. — connects to: Reader positions determine what Indian English fiction can signify — Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader: Selected Works of…, 1963
• QUESTION: What distinguishes Aboulela’s ‘blind faith in fiction’ from Naqvi’s destabilizing narrative strategy in Home Boy?