The Reluctant Fundamentalist

Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist is a sporadically intelligent East-meets-West novel that takes place over a single evening at an outdoor Lahore café, as a Pakistani man describes his conflicted post-9/11 attitudes toward the United States to his American dining companion. The novel establishes a good amount of narrative tension (and a pleasingly ambiguous ending), but is undone by the monologue structure of the book, as the narrator pushes the plot forward with awkward asides. This unfortunately undercuts what could have been a much more interesting two-way conversation.