Prose and Possibility in The Last White Man by Mohsin Hamid

In the manner of Gregor Samsa in Kafka’s Metamorphosis, Anders, the protagonist of Mohsin Hamid’s novella, The Last White Man, wakes up to find himself transformed. He’s not a bug, however. As you might expect from the title, Anders has turned brown. We’re never quite sure why—there is some speculation that there was something in the water—but brown he is, “a deep and undeniable brown.” Soon others begin turning brown as well.

It’s a curious premise, and even more curious is the way the novel plays out in sentences that spill onto its pages, running into one another, mediated here and there by commas before tumbling to a finish. The style made me want to sit down and write.

Here’s what emerged:

Oddly, the book makes you want to read it out loud and then you find yourself in your own present time, thinking about what it might mean to look in the mirror and not see yourself, and worse, maybe that’s what works about it; it makes you think about all the times when you have been surrounded by white people and have caught a glimpse of all of you in a window or something like that and thought you were looking at someone else but it was you in the middle of that sea of paleness that you had never given a blink about before that moment.

Whoa! Had I even intended to write that? That style made me go there. It’s contagious!

The Last White Man is a quick read, all the way from its recognizable opening line. His newly browned skin drives Anders to strip away the layers of himself as he comes up against the people in his life and their reactions to his new condition.

Hamid has said it was only after 9-11 that he began to encounter the notion that “I was someone suspicious. I was somebody threatening. I would be stopped at the airport or stopped at immigration, or people would behave strangely if I walked onto a subway car or a bus with a backpack.” See the complete interview on PBS.

I find it fascinating that he chose to inhabit a white man turning brown in this novel, because I wondered what the brown people (there were some already in town, who had always been that way) made of everyone suddenly becoming like them.

Still, the writing’s so restless and jittery that it really carried me along, right through to the surprise when I found out who it was the title referred to—not Anders, obviously. And there were passages like this one that just captured the world we live in:

Online you could form your own opinion of what was going on, and your opinion was, likely as not, different from the next person’s, and there was no real way to determine, which of you was right, and the boundary between what was in your mind, and what was in the world beyond was blurry, so blurry there is almost no boundary at all.

Right? There’s more—the book pushes against the absurdity of purity as an ideal, against the sorting of people into groups based on arbitrary criteria. And I liked the hope it holds out against all odds, for dissolving such borders, someday, somehow. All delivered in very long sentences that make you want to read them aloud and start mental thought-clouds of your own.