Whiteness is a seduction. Whiteness can be an phantasm. These are the dual motifs on which Pakistani author Mohsin Hamid props up The Final White Man, his new novel about race metamorphosis and human morality. Anchored within the naked and elegiac prose Hamid has made his trademark model, the ebook springboards from a single unexplained incident. Anders, a white man, awakens one morning to a brand new actuality: his pores and skin has “turned a deep and simple brown.”
The transformation, of which Anders’ is the primary—however not the one, and positively not the final—elicits worthy exploration. What if whiteness have been all of the sudden gone? Would the social order of life come undone? Would something change? The place Hamid lands doesn’t precisely persuade.
The sequence of occasions that follows performs into an historic worry, that of The Different. (One’s must estrange, Toni Morrison has stated, is “a determined try to substantiate one’s personal self as regular.”) For Anders, confusion bubbles. Panic swells. Initially, he flirts with ideas of violence after realizing the transformation is irreversible. “He wished to kill the coloured man who confronted him right here in his residence,” Hamid writes, “to extinguish the life animating this different’s physique, to go away nothing standing however himself, as he was earlier than.”
It’s comprehensible why those that profit from a specific standing would do something to protect it. The acutely aware seduction of energy, of understanding the privileges from which one advantages and the life it affords, is, partially, in regards to the necessity of management. I’d most likely be upset and slightly unhappy if I misplaced all of that, too.
However there isn’t a earlier than Anders can return to. Increasingly more, residents remodel from white to various shades of brown, at first inflicting uproar, till just one particular person—from which the novel attracts its seemingly doom-laden title—is the remaining reservoir of whiteness.
At this level, the novel’s questions start to stack. What’s left to carry on to after such a life-altering prevalence? What stays paramount? Hamid solutions: Love.
The nice staging of Hamid’s work is intimacy; the grooves of human attachment his sole preoccupation. He’s among the many foremost diviners of partnership: of friendships, lifetime loves, and shattered marriages. Of how love is crystalized, of every part love can maintain, what it might probably and can face up to throughout time. He understands—and in return makes us perceive—our cavernous want for one more, that someplace bone-deep we can not make it alone.
Hamid cycles into and out of the rotating threads—pleasure, loss, grief, anger, pleasure, delivery, and rebirth—that animate the material of his storytelling, utilizing Anders and his girlfriend Oona to sew every part collectively. Having made peace with the tide of change, and all that it has upended, the pair enterprise again into the world. “Nobody there on the bar regarded solely comfy, not the bartender, and never the lads huddled in the one occupied sales space … not any of those darkish individuals bathed within the bar-colored gentle, looking for their footing in a scenario so acquainted and but so unusual,” Oona observes. Or “possibly everybody regarded the identical as they at all times did,” she thought. It’s only after “the whiskey settles into her stomach” that she realizes that “the distinction was gone.”
