Beautiful narration can recruit readers into complicity with dictatorship-figures.

Evidence

We are told that true novelistic villains, as exemplified by Mrs. Newsome, the tyrannical matriarch in James’s novel The Ambassadors, have “dictatorial minds” (249). Nabokov’s skill and his “beautiful language” (41) unnervingly lead us into complicity with this monster, who is “a villain because he lacked curiosity about other people and their lives … Humbert, like most dictators was interested only in his own version of other people” (48). Here for once, in a text that constantly strives to keep all its elements firmly within its rigid grip, is an irony that manages to be entirely unself-conscious. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 240

Categorization

• XREF: Bears directly on whether the seductive first-person voice of The Reluctant Fundamentalist implicates Changez or his reader — a central hinge question for the reader.