Word: moth
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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...
...Moth Smoke is about rich young professionals in nuclear-age Pakistan. The year is 1998, and Pakistan is testing its nuclear arsenal and beating its chest in India's general direction. India reciprocates with bomb test-runs of its own and with diplomatic sneers. The bomb is the menacing and distracting backdrop for all the personal problems the twentysomething characters of Moth Smoke have to face. ("Nothing like nuclear escalation," says one character, "to help you forget your problems.") The children of soldiers and entrepreneurs, they struggle with politics, as well as with the usual generational issues: finding a place...
...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...
...might guess, 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...
...title, drawn from an overworked image of a moth immolating itself on a candle (after being fired, Daru can't pay the power bills), reflects two themes that pervade the book. For one, the moth's attraction to the flame is a kind of self-destructive love, much like Daru's own love for Mumtaz. The second is the theme of smoking, which symbolizes that self-destructive impulse...