- Title: The Hypebeast
- Author: Adnan Khan
- Genre: Fiction
- Publisher: Rare Machines/Dundurn Press
- Pages: 400
If Plato banished the poets from the Republic for fear their work would glorify bad deeds and inspire audiences to the same, someone should banish Adnan Khan’s new novel from contemporary Canada. I mean this as a compliment, if premised on the glorious delusion that ethnic hustlers in contemporary Canada read literary fiction. If they did, The Hypebeast is both a how-to-guide and cautionary tale.
A creepy CRA robocall sparked Adnan Khan’s crime thriller The Hypebeast
The novel, Khan’s second, follows the ups and downs of Hamid, a Bombay-born Torontonian who migrates to Canada with his parents in the early 1990s, to get clear of sectarian conflicts and anti-Muslim violence in an increasingly Hindutva-inflected India. His family life fails: Hamid tells us that his father’s “ambition extinguished itself getting us to the country. Its bitter pit remained.” His father also develops an acidic attitude toward his son, a penchant for nightly overdrinking and a guiltless practice of physically abusing Hamid’s mother. In the present moment of the novel, she has left Hamid’s father, while he maintains a brittle relationship with him while at work and play in the fake gold, Value Village luxury suit netherworlds of ethnic urban life. On a regular basis, Hamid and friends rent swish downtown condos for decadent weekend parties, filling Grey Goose bottles with Iceberg vodka and collecting money to pay Airbnb.
At one of these, he tries to impress a hard-drinking Filipina by telling her he works in “sales”; she can tell he’s a fast and big-talker without much behind it, but she kind of likes this. Romance follows, and also lots of sweaty, squishy sex, which Khan describes in swaggering laddish detail that soon becomes tiresome and is matched, later in the novel, when the relationship craters, by passages of thoughtful dialogue and sensitive interiority that are even grosser.
More engaging is Khan’s sense of where young men like Hamid can make their mark in contemporary Canada: not by going after aging wealthy white people but instead by going after aging, semi-wealthy ethnics, the kind of people who own “six Wendy’s” or run grey businesses in the strip-mall outer reaches of Toronto. What follows is a succession of scams related to income taxes, charities and consumer goods, worked up and perpetrated by Hamid and his buddies – one of whom drives a “champagne Corolla,” which is so wonderfully auspicious. Their specific targets: older first-generation immigrants from South Asia.
This focus really made me like this book: Khan’s novel explores tensions in Canadian life that go well beyond newcomer and settler binaries. These tensions turn on a conflicted sense of ambition, on the part of young men like Hamid, as Khan conveys brilliantly partway through the novel, when Hamid is trying to make the case to a friend about working a possible connection on behalf of some other guys: “All they want is to go legit. To appear to go legit.” So much depends on that distinction, both in terms of how the main characters in the novel conceive of their life’s purpose, and in terms of the novel’s plot.
With Hamid either a main player or the guy getting played, if not frequently doing both at the same time, the plot involves, beyond its array of small-money-making schemes, a stolen puma (the jungle cat, not the trainers); a severed hand; a fast-expanding Islamic charity founded by a charismatic, enigmatic religious entrepreneur with an Omar Khadr-like backstory; a torture cell in a house on a nice bland street; religious conversions that undermine romantic designs; and also hundreds, thousands, then hundreds of thousands of dollars stolen, multiple times. I’m probably missing something, indeed many things.
Books we’re reading and loving this week: Globe readers share their picks
The book is a confidently sprawling mess; Khan wants to say and explore a lot when it comes to faith, family, money, relationships and a hungry young man’s standing in the world when he always feels caught between who he is and who he wants to be while facing a world in which “no one knew us.” Like characters in novels by the likes of Aravind Adiga, Mohsin Hamid and Gautam Malkani, and so too the rambling, striving protagonist of Mo Amer and Ramy Youssef’s Netflix series Mo, and with V.S. Naipaul enthroned in the deeper, darker background, Khan’s hero Hamid wants the world to know him on his own terms.
Things never work out as he wants and works them to, but he’s never not hungry, never not ready to fail better the next time.
Randy Boyagoda is a novelist and professor of English at the University of Toronto.
