Daniyal Mueenuddin’s In Other Rooms, Other Wonders starts off in the machined, airless style typical of Jhumpa Lahiri’s shorts. It’s a bloodless, self-consciously arty gloss I can admire but not love. Midway through the linked stories, however, the author breaks out flashier scansion like china at a kudi nu vekhan.

And that’s when the book gets interesting. It’s not that Mueenuddin stops writing about the modest lives of the Punjabi underclass in a tone of impermanence and melancholy. His mien is restrained in these tales, tinged with resignation rather than resentment. But he interleaves them with stories about the elite, and though the vast gulf between the classes is off-putting, Mueenuddin feels freer here. He’s upper-class, though self-aware; he’s shared these experiences; a recurring character, the artsy, culturally adept American wife of a rich Pakistani landowner, is very much the story of his own mother.

If Mueenuddin has a weakness, it’s writing romance. The story ‘Lily’ contains great subtlety and psychological insight into a marriage, but at times it shades purple. Only a handful of authors like Michael Ondaatje can carry off taking themselves that seriously. Nadine Gordimer succeeds, but only for a short while; and when the dialogue is too pat and literary to be believable, it brings down the whole illusion. ‘Lily’ is admirably flawed, writing the relationship with the specificity of lived experience, and like The Namesake, it thrums with fear of libertine females:

On the verge of excusing herself, she looked at him, his thin supercilious features and silver-minted look, which she had once admired in young rich Pakistani men and had long outgrown — and then against that, the appearance of strength, of vigor, reflected in his posture, sitting relaxed and looking agreeably out into the night…

He lit a joint… Of course, he’d been at Princeton, he must have more or less gone through all that, rich Pakistanis at school in America almost invariably did — in her single year at NYU, failing, not even taking the spring semester exams, she herself received an entire parallel education, going around with an Iranian boyfriend three years older than herself, who tooks bumps of coke all day and night…

Belonging to a certain type, who are almost involuntarily successful with women and spoiled by women, Bumpy indulged himself… spent months at a time in Paris… where he supposedly worked long day son the great Pakistani novel — though no one had ever been allowed to read it. Lily saw that both Mino and Bumpy understood her in a way that Murad did not. They were feminine in their perceptions, could follow her braided impulses and desires. Murad was wholly masculine, so that he experienced as a mystery Lily’s indecision, her instinct when confronted with two choices to reach for both.

I’d love to read more of Pakistanis flirting abroad, like the East Village canoodling in Moth Smoke. Rooms shares with Mohsin Hamid’s other novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist the sense that Pakistanis are no longer welcome in America. From the story ‘Our Lady of Paris’:

‘He could live in America.’

‘And how would that be? He would be emasculated, not American and not with any place in Pakistan… I see these boys come through Karachi on two-week vacations — the boys who settled in America — and they always have this odd tamed look, a bit sheepish. It’s so much worse after 9/11 — they more or less apologize daily. Sohail’s background will always be a factor… they would knock a bit of that out of him.’

We haven’t seen a novel out of this man yet, but from the mela surrounding the fictional K.K. Harouni household, Mueenuddin is the real thing.

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