Word: pakistani
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There is a strong case to made, based on Mohsin Hamid's debut novel Moth Smoke, that "Generation X" is not just an American thing. There is at least as much drug abuse in this fine new Pakistani novel as you'll find in a Winona Ryder movie, and enough navel-gazing existentialism to fill half a Lisa Loeb album...
...these quests were not complicated enough, the young Pakistanis in this story face the slightly smaller challenge of finding good hash. Marijuana is the leisure drug of the young Pakistani elite, and the act of smoking, selling and buying it takes many pages of Moth Smoke. The drug abuse starts tame, then slowly escalates in proportion to the intricacy of the narrative, until by the end, selling highs is the main character's business...
...this book does not admit much humor--it is, after all, an account of Daru's slow and painful descent from yuppie respectability to scumminess. But Moth Smoke never gets cumbersome, and even at its most heavy, the narrators are a sympathetic and colorful bunch. They are all, by Pakistani standards, moneyed and elite. (Even Daru, the novel's hard-luck case, has a servant boy.) Most everyone has a sport-utility vehicle to negotiate the rotting streets of Lahore, a city without enough public works to take care of its roads. Indeed, the novel at times seems like...
...keen depiction of a lost Pakistani generation will invite comparisons with F. Scott Fitzgerald, though perhaps a closer analogue would be the late Robert Bingham, who did for overly rich young New Yorkers what Hamid is doing for their Pakistani counterparts. And given the focus on substance abuse, one might even call it a Pakistani Trainspotting, minus some luridness and plus a smattering of Urdu. Could this novel have been set in New York? Probably not. The corruption among the elite, the nuclear threat and the constellation of gender and social issues in Pakistan work in a constellation that would...
...terrorism against Americans - there was one U.S. citizen aboard the hijacked plane - and that suggests Pakistan should clearly be on the list," says TIME Washington correspondent Massimo Calabresi. "But it's not going to happen, because we can't afford to close the door on Pakistan - Pakistani cooperation is the only chance we have of capturing Osama Bin Laden. Terrorism is the No. 1 national security priority right now, and Pakistan continues to cooperate, although perhaps not as much as Washington would like." They've helped the U.S. arrest World Trade Center bomber Ramzi Yousef, as well...