A protagonist’s delusions of control set up his narrative fall

Evidence

Control is all, and Perowne is happiest in those spaces where he can exert the most command and filter out random threats to his equanimity: his luxurious Bloomsbury townhouse with its imposing library and wine cellar, his expensive car, and the operating theater. However, as the delusions of divinity suggest, Perowne’s convictions themselves have something of the quality of religious faith, and his hubris means that, from the outset, in the historical moment of threat he inhabits there is always the sense that he is riding for a fall. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 105

Categorization

• SEED: A tool for reading Naqvi’s protagonist in Home Boy: his American assimilationist confidence as a brittle architecture built to collapse under 9/11.