THE RUNAWAYS: A Novel, flawed, interesting, but beware the animal cruelty

THE RUNAWAYS: A Novel
FATIMA BHUTTO
Verso Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$9.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: The lives of three radicalized Muslim teenagers—two from Pakistan, one from the United Kingdom—intersect in the Iraqi desert as they travel to a jihadi training camp in Mosul.

Anita lives in Karachi’s biggest slum. Her mother is a maalish wali, paid to massage the tired bones of rich women. But Anita’s life will change forever when she meets her elderly neighbor, a man whose shelves of books promise an escape to a different world.

On the other side of Karachi lives Monty, whose father owns half the city and expects great things of him. But when a beautiful and rebellious girl joins his school, Monty will find his life going in a very different direction.

Sunny’s father left India and went to England to give his son the opportunities he never had. Yet Sunny doesn't fit in anywhere. It’s only when his charismatic cousin comes back into his life that he realizes his life could hold more possibilities than he ever imagined.

These three lives will cross in the desert, a place where life and death walk hand in hand, and where their closely guarded secrets will force them to make a terrible choice.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: What is the process of radicalization? It's ever more timely a question. We in the US are not accustomed to thinking the radicalization process applies to women. In this story, Author Bhutto, whose family has been deeply damaged by radicalized people, treats the process as gender-blind.

I'm glad she did that. In 2026, we need to be aware of how readily educated minds can be co-opted into fields of endeavor I can only think of as anti-social. I'm quite sure Author Bhutto knows each of these people. I'm clear she does not want us to think of them as pieces of a monolithic belief group, but people who found a path to serve a larger purpose and discover a way to live a meaningful life.

Religion being a human thing I dislike and decline to participate in, this story is one I simply read to gain some semblance of understanding for its apparent magnetic appeal to others. I'm no more clear about it now. None of these misguided young people, particularly gay young Sunny, make any tiniest bit of sense to me. I understand none of their motivations any better after the read than before. They're tedious rebellious adolescents. Their path to selfhood and separation from their parents is not one I like or support; I expected that. I wanted to understand at least a little better what inflames the young passions in this cause I don't like or wish success for; not forthcoming. Instead there is an animal cruelty scene I'll never be able to unread.

Not a success for my aims, then; as a novel curiously unsuccessful too. Three PoVs, one deep (Sunny the gay lad...what the hell, Sunny, they'll kill you when they know you're queer!); Monty the vapid rich boy, a gray fog of words and no lightning except an obsession with a girl; Anita...well, what was Anita's PoV? Why was she included when she changed the least of the three?

Monty's mother's religious faith, surprisingly, plays a very small role in this tale pf Muslims becoming radicalized. She is a believer who is not radicalized; why is she not given a role in trying to explain his path's consequences to Monty, instead of abetting him in his course? She is not at all committed to it, that's clear.

I wasn't satisfied on a craft level, then; I didn't get what I'd hoped for; so why am I rating it over three stars? Because Author Bhutto herself is part of a family (follow the link above) terribly impacted by the dreadful roiling cauldron of extremism. I felt her presence in the spaces sh left for me to contemplate the fates of her runaways. It was enough for me to connect emotionally with this flawed novel.

I warn off those squeamish about animal cruelty. Others less sensitive, particularly gay Muslim lads, might get more of a satisfying reading experience.

HOW TO GET FILTHY RICH IN RISING ASIA, entrepreneurship's dark side

HOW TO GET FILTHY RICH IN RISING ASIA
MOHSIN HAMID
Riverhead Books
$17.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: His first two novels established Mohsin Hamid as a radically inventive storyteller with his finger on the world’s pulse. How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia meets that reputation and exceeds it. The astonishing and riveting tale of a man’s journey from impoverished rural boy to corporate tycoon, it steals its shape from the business self-help books devoured by ambitious youths all over “rising Asia.” It follows its nameless hero to the sprawling metropolis where he begins to amass an empire built on that most fluid, and increasingly scarce, of goods: water. Yet his heart remains set on something else: on the pretty girl whose star rises along with his, their paths crossing and recrossing, a lifelong affair sparked and snuffed and sparked again by the forces that careen their fates along.

How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia is a striking slice of contemporary life at a time of crushing upheaval. Romantic without being sentimental, political without being didactic, and spiritual without being religious, it brings an unflinching gaze to the violence and hope it depicts. And it creates two unforgettable characters who find moments of transcendent intimacy in the midst of shattering change.

THE PUBLISHER PROVIDED ME WITH A REVIEW COPY OF THIS BOOK AT MY REQUEST. THANKS!

My Review: An internationally flavored mash-up of Death of a Salesman and The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit.

I liked both of those stories, and this one too. I got tired of the second-person gag way early, and it took most of a month to read the book because of that.

What I most appreciated about the book was Hamid's gift for the pithy aperçu:

We are all refugees from our childhoods.

Readers don’t work for writers. They work for themselves.

The fruits of labor are delicious, but individually they’re not particularly fattening.

I love this sort of distilled wisdom. I like the way Hamid feeds it to his readers, in logical places, in small bites, in the course of telling the story. He doesn't set his gems in solitaires but parures. It makes for a richer reading experience this way.

Reading is a subject of interest in this book, the characters read and discuss reading-the-act as well as what they have read. The point of reading is a major revelation within the book:

Writers and readers seek a solution to the problem that time passes, that those who have gone are gone and those who will go, which is to say every one of us, will go. For there was a moment when anything was possible. And there will be a moment when nothing is possible. But in between we can create.

But when you read a book, what you see are black squiggles on pulped wood or, increasingly, dark pixels on a pale screen. To transform these icons into characters and events, you must imagine. And when you imagine, you create.

It is exactly this that makes reading, moreso than watching, such a dangerous and subversive act, one that threatens tyrants throughout history. It is also exactly this that powers anti-intellectualism throughout history: The ability to decode and derive layers of meaning from a text is hugely threatening to people who aren't educationally or intellectually prepared for it. They can't see what you see...therefore YOU must be wrong and YOU are The Enemy.

But what you do sense, what is unmistakable, is a rising tide of frustration and anger and violence, born partly of the greater familiarity the poor today have with the rich, their faces pressed to that clear window on wealth afforded by ubiquitous television, and partly of the change in mentality that results from an outward shift in the supply curve for firearms.

An unnervingly sharp eye for the realities at ground level makes that a gift, if one is willing to receive it, from Hamid to culturally isolated US readers. He isn't likely to be around when you use the gift he's given you. Novelists, after all, are ephemeral culturally speaking. Think I'm wrong? How often does anyone you know speak of Ellen Glasgow or Erskine Caldwell? Influential in their times, they're forgotten and unread by the mass of Americans today. Much as I love reading, the visual media are (bizarrely to me) longer lasting in their impact on the cultural discussion. Many more film directors of similar impact to Caldwell or Glasgow are remembered and discussed today, eg Alfred Hitchcock.

But it's a gift nonetheless:

From the perspective of the world's national security apparatuses you exist in several locations. You appear on property and income-tax registries, on passport and ID card databases. You show up on passenger manifests and telephone logs . . . You are fingertip swirls, facial ratios, dental records, voice patterns, spending trails, e-mail threads.

This is a very stark reality. Everyone leaves a paper trail. Its existence is part of daily life in developed countries and its immense data store includes essentially the entire world. It is an ever-growing monster, The Blob writ large.

Here, though, is the inescapable conclusion that we learn from the data being crunched:

In the history of the evolution of the family, you and the millions of other migrants like you represent an ongoing proliferation of the nuclear. It is an explosive transformation, the supportive, stifling, stabilizing bonds of extended relationships weakening and giving way, leaving in their wake insecurity, anxiety, productivity, and potential.

It is this force that will form the world of tomorrow. It is history being made, reported by storyteller Hamid. It is your future, white America, read it and learn.