Erica’s failed authorship mirrors literature’s subordination to market forces in Hamid’s novel

Evidence

Hamid is, then, in some respects critiquing the globalizing of media and culture that his own novel is a part of. Yet he also attempts to mitigate the functionalist view through a renewed attention to story making. The Reluctant Fundamentalist in fact performs the manipulation of literature through globalization via its consideration of authorship and the literary. This manipulation can first be seen in the fate of the novel’s creative writer, Erica. We could say that Erica represents the unsuccessful writer, the one who fails to reconcile herself to contemporary market realities. Her excitement at acquiring a literary agent is not at first tempered by his warning that the novella—her preferred form—is “a platypus of a beast” and notoriously difficult to market (87). Yet as her psychological problems mount, she can no longer find refuge in writing and ignores her agent’s calls: “I used to turn to it, my writing, when I needed to get something out that was stuck inside. But I can’t get it out now. It pulls me in, you know? I dwell on it instead of writing it” (111–12). Finally, after her disappearance, when Changez brings himself to read her manuscript, his disappointment is palpable: “I could not locate Erica in the rhythms or sounds of what she had written; it seemed a mistake” (166). — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 462

Categorization

• XREF: Core to the reader’s hinge task: Erica’s story-making failure gives a tool for reading how The Reluctant Fundamentalist uses authorship within its own structure.
• DEFINE: Illustrates what Morey means by a novel ‘performing’ the manipulation of literature through globalization — a critical vocabulary term.
• QUESTION: Does Erica’s failed writing also encode her ethnic/national fragmentation, linking her creative block to her symbolic role as America?