Review: Exit West

Exit West by Mohsin Hamid
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad has gotten a lot of deserved attention for the way it takes an historical metaphor – the underground railroad – and makes it real. Mohsin Hamid does the same thing here, and he does it with a strategy rooted even more fully in the fabulous mode. This is a good and a powerful novel, one that deserves to stand next to Whitehead’s, and one that raises many of the same questions in a transnational context.

The essential premise here is that there is a “door” to the West from the violence-riddled Middle East. That’s a common metaphor as in “close the door to future immigrants,” but it becomes literal here: throughout a city consumed by war and terror, doors begin to open up that allow refugees instant departure to Australia, Europe and, eventually, the United States.

If that sounds too sci-fi, it isn’t. It’s as everyday as the sometimes dingy, sometimes spectacular railroad in Whitehead’s book. There are many such doors, most guarded by the triumphant revolutionaries, but a few accessible through the black market. Once they open, though, they don’t really permit return. Those who leave, leave. They lose the worries that consume them and find fresh ones.

Hamid handles all of it with real delicacy, and it’s hard to believe the novel is as short and compelling as it is. There is something fabulous in the way he handles it all, and he has a gift for drawing complicated pictures with a few, quick lines. This feels like a fable in its absence of detail. From its near fairy-tale opening to its frequent change of scene, it gives us whole scenes from a handful of images.

None of it would work without Hamid’s deep skill. The scene where Saeed says farewell to his father has an emotional density that’s hard to describe – two decent people are trying to say the right thing to each other. Each knows his sacrifice will cost the other, yet he also knows he has to make it. The result is moving as well as fleeting. It’s the hard nugget of detail that gives form to the larger fable around it.

The relationship between Saaed and Nadia is wonderful as well. We open with an almost traditional boy-meets-girl scene, but everything eventually gets inflected by the weight of religion, tradition, gender roles, and Western culture. It would be so easy for Hamid to lose the weave of it all and give into cliché or sell at least one character short. Instead, he retains the same quick-sketch mode that serves him so well. Nothing is easy, and no one is to blame. These decent people are just caught in a world vastly larger than their private one.

I’m giving real thought to teaching this the next time I get to do a Contemporary American literature class. I think there’s a question about whether it’s American or postcolonial, but it speaks so interestingly to The Underground Railroad, and it’s such a powerful novel in its own right, that I think I may go for it.

I’ve heard only a little about Hamid, but, on the strength of this, I want to keep going. There’s so much skill here concentrated into so small and efficient a story, that I certainly find myself wanting more.


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