Writing About Writing: Mohsin Hamid's 'The Last White Man'
A semi-review of a fictional book and the reality it reflects.
Architecture Dance was supposed to be a newsletter/podcast/media empire focused on “writing about music.” Because “writing about music is like dancing architecture,” as someone once said. But writing about anything is like dancing about architecture. Writing about writing maybe even more so. No one wants to hear a song about a song. For the second installment of Architecture Dance, I am not writing about music but—given my relative lack of experience writing non-fiction about fiction—I am for sure still hosting a tourist cruise on the Chicago river, doing the stanky leg about the Wrigley building. This week, I am writing about a book.
This essay exploded out of me unprompted after I finished reading said book in a single sitting, like I am both the lone English teacher and lone student of a private high school somehow more egotistical than Kanye’s. I sent the piece to a couple literary sites which have either already covered the topic or aren’t interested in my perspective. As a reader and writer of fiction I have long avoided attempting literary criticism, but I have a newfound appreciation of the form and aspire to improve at the challenging craft. So I am self-publishing this blemished semi-review of Mohsin Hamid’s The Last White Man as a document of my stilted choreography. It’s not writing about music but it’s writing about something, which tends to be better than writing about nothing. Also, I mentioned Kanye, so now I’ve written about music. But please, let me stop unnecessarily over-justifying. Allow me to dance.
For a novel with a heavy theme that’s been marinating in Mohsin Hamid’s mind since 9/11, when the Pakistan-born author experienced societal erasure of his own perceived “whiteness” in the US and UK, The Last White Man feels as pertinent now as ever. The speculative framework of the book is that the skin tone of random white people, via some unexplained phenomenon, has begun spontaneously changing to a darker brown hue. The racial identity of white people is—as many characters both in the novel and outside of it believe—under hostile threat. Capable of changing overnight.
Like Hamid’s other work, the allegorical approach addresses a complex but pressing societal issue. The skin color-changing plague affects his characters in their unnamed fictional country, but reflects the reader’s real world. The theme is obvious and overt. You know what you are getting into when you open the book, but Hamid’s prose is what causes you, line-by-line, to think about it as deeply as he has.
There are actual weirdos in this actual world who expend actual energy actually worrying about birth rates. Whether it’s Elon, Tucker, an economics professor or a manifesto-writing mass shooter, the unabashed, purportedly rational call for people to have more babies has undertones that reek of irrational white supremacy. No matter how well the racism is concealed, the stench is as obvious and potent as vomit. Being in the vicinity of vomit used to make everyone nauseous, or at least cover their noses and pretend to be. Now, too many walk toward it, swallow it, then regurgitate it in altered form. A lot of people actually think that white people are going to be replaced, and that that will be a bad thing (sidenote, I recognize that the issue of birth rates affects non-white countries, but it’s been weaponized by white weirdos in white countries, and also any living person who’s worried that other living people aren’t creating enough other new living people are, without a doubt, weird as hell).
The Last White Man imagines that 4chan’s wet nightmare has come true, treating the ridiculous premise with an appropriate dose of existential absurdity. The opening line is a Kafka allusion (I learned this from reading other reviews, despite being familiar with but never having read The Metamorphosis, which shows how literary criticism can maybe have some value and add to the context of reading literature. Idk. I’m still trying to justify why anyone would ever want to read or write about writing, and my attempt to do so here doubles as a reflection on the process itself. Yes I should delete this parenthetical, but this is my newsletter, and I’m not going to.) Anders, the main character, wakes up to find himself metamorphosed not into a giant bug, but a brown-skinned man. A series of situations, like encountering random white strangers, having sex with his white partner Oona, and visiting his dying white father, throw him into a self-reflective identity crisis.
The novel stays close to Anders and Oona’s perspectives but also describes the impact Anders’ condition—which goes on to slowly afflict the entire fictional nation, until most realize that a darker skin tone is not at all an affliction—has on broader community relations. There are riots and militias and public suicides and incessant chatter and debate always going on and evolving in the background.
The Last White Man will resonate with contemporary readers because of this societal relevance. But the questions it raises are unanswerable. Or the raising of them will do little to reverse the backward worldview of the average threatened white weirdo. And yet, they are intriguing to think about. What would happen if everyone suddenly had the same skin tone? Would we finally see each other as human? Would division and perceived hierarchy persist? Is race nothing more than a societal construct? What does that say about Rachel Dolezal, or Brother Ali? What does it mean that this book only talks about race from a white-turned-brown perspective? What does it mean about my own identity that I am reading and engaging with it as a white reader?
Spending time with the novel at least ensures those questions receive intentional consideration. Of course, reality will never have a resolution the way fictional worlds must. Our real plagues are far from turning the populace brown. Our society is further still from reaching a point of disgruntled acceptance and deepened interpersonal connection. An impossible distance away from getting along.
The overarching theme of race-as-a-construct overtakes The Last White Man, more so even than the theme of migration did in Hamid’s 2017 novel Exit West, which had more trackable action and higher stakes. At The Last White Man’s foreground is a story about the relationships among Anders, Oona, and their respective single parents, but the plot is not what makes this book a rare literary page-turner. First of all it’s short, and could be devoured in a day or two (to reiterate my brag, I did it in one). Also Hamid’s unorthodox sentence structure—the main draw of all his novels—once again provides a reason to keep going. Line-by-line, his fragmented ideas also metamorphose into essential threads of a thematically-consistent lyrical web.
Hamid’s prose skews in some ways close to Arabic and other non-Western literary traditions: long sentences American editors might mark up and decry as run-ons, packed with both poetic description and practical action that jumps through time. Take, as an example, the below paragraph-sentence from early in The Last White Man, where Hamid explores Anders’ internal reaction to the way strangers look at him in public after his skin tone changes. In this one long sentence a lot happens both externally to the character and, through clever interjections like “damn it,” inside the character’s head.
“When Anders got back in his car it occurred to him that the three people he had seen were all white, and that he was perhaps being paranoid, inventing meaning out of details that might not matter, and at a traffic light he confronted his gaze in the rearview mirror, looked for the whiteness there, for it must be somewhere, maybe in his expression, but he could not see it, and the more he looked the less white he seemed, as though looking for his whiteness was the opposite of whiteness, was driving it further away, making him seem desperate, or uncertain, or like he did not belong, he who had been born here, damn it, and then he heard the loud continuous horn of the car to his rear, and he started to move past a signal that had some seconds ago turned green, and the woman behind him swerved to overtake, and rolled down her window, and cursed him, furious, cursed good and hard and sped off, and he did nothing, nothing, not shout back, not smile to disarm her, nothing, like he was mentally deficient, and she was pretty, really pretty, or had been before she shouted, and when he got home he wondered how he would have reacted, how he could have reacted, if there had only been some way for her to know he was white, or for him to know it, because suddenly, and there was no hiding from the full weight of this, he did not.”
The above paragraph is one example of many in which Hamid uses short bursts of description to offer insight into a character’s psychology, while also dissecting the novel’s main themes. In this paragraph-sentence, Anders gazes at his changed face in the mirror, stalls at a green light and then chooses not to react to the road-raged woman who passes because he’s unsure of his own identity. Each of these small actions hints at the traits of the character without abandoning the exploration of the larger idea. Within one extended sentence, Hamid presents the reader with simultaneous messages: race is a societal context, and here is how that affects this character, and probably you, the reader. If you the reader don’t want to think about any of that, you can just appreciate the craft of his prose.
The style is reminiscent of Rawi Hage, the Lebanese-Canadian writer whose works like De Niro’s Game and Beirut Hellfire Society favor long sentences punctuated with commas rather than separated ideas utilizing periods. This form of writing goes against all American English class conventions, but more closely mimics the natural speech of oral storytellers. It reads like a song. Like a transcript of the best freestyle you’ve ever heard, before you realize the MC is pulling a different type of magic trick, and is instead reciting a pre-written verse over a new beat. Hamid isn’t going full Kerouac and writing off the top of the dome, but he has sequenced these lines and sentences the way an omniscient mind might have thought them.
Depending on who’s reading, The Last White Man could be either a short but powerful and poetic rumination on race couched in a simple character-driven family story and light romance for the literary fiction crowd, or a horror novel for un-hooded, brain-poisoned neo-nazis. As much as the indirect but implied opinions of Hamid and most of his readers will align, the book is more meditation than manifesto. It explores important themes relevant to the author, the reader, and everyone, especially at this moment. This lofty thematic exploration is prioritized at the expense of what could have been higher narrative stakes and tension. There could have been more of a plot. But Hamid doesn’t need a compelling story to keep people reading. It’s enough to pontificate along with him about racial identity, or to marvel at the refined technical precision of his sentence structure, the length of which should never work but always does. More than two decades into his career as a published novelist, with as much time spent considering the ideas discussed in The Last White Man, Hamid is writing at the peak of his undeniable ability: from his zoomed-out view of race to the granular details of his long ass sentences. The theme is relevant now like it was 20 years ago, and good prose always will be.