Novelistic worlding differs through containment versus global circulation

Evidence

Such webs are central to the critique offered by Burnt Shadows. Sticky and intractable, they span decades and continents, forming a contrast to the webs of affection that support the novel’s hybrid families, the Tanaka-Ashrafs and the Weiss-Burtons, whose threads are spun in the shadow of some of the twentieth century’s darkest international moments. Yet the two novels’ attempts at worlding differ in important ways: in The Wasted Vigil, war constantly circles around the central characters in their small Afghan town and encroaches on them in the benighted, claustrophobic space of the house where the Job-like Marcus waits for the latest trial to be visited upon him. In Burnt Shadows, characters travel the world yet are still ensnared in webs of destructive nationalism and communalism. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 418

Categorization

• XREF: The containment vs. global-circulation spatial distinction maps onto how Hamid confines Changez to Lahore versus Naqvi moving the narrator through New York.
• DEFINE: Introduces ‘worlding’ as the analytical term for how a novel constructs its geopolitical spatial field — the vocabulary sought for reading Hamid and Naqvi.