Mohsin Hamid’s novel, How To Get Filthy Rich In Rising Asia, is an exercise in genre fusion. As a result of this, the novel has an extremely interesting tone and narrative style, which I talked about in my previous post concerning the book. At the end, the novel takes a philosophical turn for the worst. Hamid’s language goes from purely voyeuristic to deeply introspective and this change of tone left me wondering why. One of the things that occurred to me when I was reading the last chapter was that Hamid, perhaps, does not trust the reader to draw their own conclusions about what it means to be a “successful” human being. The book doesn’t romanticize poverty, however neither does it posit the accumulation of wealth as the means to finding fulfillment. The last chapter of the novel, “Have An Exit Strategy,” seems to be Hamid’s attempt to pointedly influence the opinion of the reader, however, the tone of the last few chapters is in opposition with the tone of the rest of the novel. The opening to this chapter begins with:
This book, I must now concede, may not have been the very best of guides to getting filthy rich in rising Asia. An apology is no doubt due. But at this late juncture, apologies alone can achieve little. Far more useful, I propose, to address ourselves to our inevitable exit strategies, yours and mine, preparation, in this lifelong case, being most of the battle.
Essentially, Hamid is telling his audience that the “getting filthy rich” part was not the point of the novel. As a reader, I felt let down by the ending of the book, because it displays a lack of author-reader trust. The novel would have been better if it continued its voyeuristic narrative style and left the meaning of life up to the reader. Hamid’s overbearing leading us by the hand style does little to convince the reader. It would have been more effective to continue his satirical tone and let the reader draw their own conclusions instead of his unsubtle ham-handed approach to philosophizing the meaning of the entire novel.
...ON THE SUBJECT OF CHEESE 
I agree with you, I was disappointed with the ending of the book. I got really upset at the very end where the main character was unsure if he had already died when he had his first heart attack earlier in the novel. He was unsure if the last decade of his life with the Pretty Girl was real or if it was all a dream. I felt like this was a bit of a cop out of sorts. And the parts where Hamid was directing readers more forcefully was a bit out of sorts with the rest of the novel. The points about success not being the main point in life kind of made me feel like the rest of the book was some what of a waste. Why did we go on this long journey only for Hamid to tell readers directly that success is not the point of life? Even if this is true, at least in Hamid’s mind, why not continue to let readers form their own opinion on the manner?
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The ending of HtGFRIRA also disappointed me (which seems to be a running theme in the class lol) but it also reminded me of a book I read for a sci-fi lit class. As I mentioned in my blog post (https://bernadettereamer.wordpress.com/2015/04/26/how-to-get-filthy-rich-on-rising-kalliope-i-earn-a-zathua-load-of-credits-and-become-iron-man/), sci-fi lit is another genre that makes use of parallel worlds to offer commentary on the real world.
The book I am thinking of is The Forever War, by Joe Haldeman. It is very similar to HtGFRiRA in the sense that there is this driving plot surrounding, as the title suggests, an intergalactic war, and yet the ending did not feel like an ending. It turns out that the war just fizzles out and ends in a truce, and the soldier protagonist is left with no purpose except to meet up with his female soldier love interest in her spaceship and hope for the best. In this case, though, the soldier was literally thousands of years out of his time due to the strange way time and light-speed travel combine (think Interstellar). He was out of place in a society where the language had changed so much that he could no longer communicate, and where the social norm was now homosexuality instead of heterosexuality.
Perhaps this is what the Narrator was feeling, although in a much less exaggerated sense. The Narrator is not thousands of years out of place, but he is falling behind and falling out of touch in the same way. And, he also has his escape pod in the form of the pretty girl.
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