Second-person narration brings home realities of poverty

Mohsin Hamid's new novel comes with a ringing endorsement on its back cover from Jay McInerney, a writer one doesn't readily associate with subcontinental fictions about escaping poverty. But McInerney can speak with authority on second-person narration, having written "Bright Lights, Big City," one of the more successful examples of this rare literary undertaking.

With "The Reluctant Fundamentalist," Hamid produced a thoroughly gripping and unsettling piece of "voice" writing in the first person, but the second person is a much trickier perspective to master. There's something accusatory about the narrational "you" that can sound wearyingly declarative, as though the writer were issuing a stream of instructions.