33 pages • 1 hour read
Mohsin HamidHow to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2013A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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The Illusion of Self-Help
The novel pretends to be a book of self-help methods but spends most of its length relating the history of the narrator’s rise to—and fall from—riches. Each chapter has a rule as its title, and taken as a list of instructions, they serve as the self-improvement framework for readers wishing to use the narrator’s philosophy. The goal of the book is ostensibly the same as the book’s title: how to get filthy rich in rising Asia. This is the first hint of the book’s satirical nature. Books written for profit tend to attempt to address the largest possible audience, and if followed literally, the methods in this book would only apply to those who aspired to—or who already did—live in Asia.
This irony becomes increasingly more clear with each chapter, as the narrator begins critiquing the concept of self-help itself. A person reads a self-help book hoping that the author will help him, not that he will help himself. The narrator even provides reasons why the very notion of a “self” is problematic when it comes to self improvement. By the end of the novel, he has managed to become filthy rich, despite losing his fortune. But he experiences few moments—at least in the pages of the novel—of genuine happiness. His methods are more appropriate to accumulating wealth than of experiencing fulfillment or reducing his own suffering.
The Divide Between Rich and Poor
Part of the narrator’s desire for riches comes from the impoverished circumstances of his childhood. He knows what it is like to be poor, so he wants to be rich. He is the only one of the three children who gains an education, at the encouragement of his father. Even as he begins to accumulate wealth and his success, it is still obvious to those of the upper classes that he is the of a servant. He grows powerful financially without ever gaining the respect of people who are predisposed to dislike him because of his clan, or region. His city and country are unnamed, but some of the class divide is analogous to the caste system in India. Near the end of the novel, when he feels tension as he observes the young people in the street, he attributes some of it to the fact that the poor are forced to live near the rich, given the layout of the city: they are constantly reminded of the gulf between how little they have, and how much others possess.
The narrator pursues his wealth with such vigilance that it highlights the competitive nature of capitalism. But it is his education and connections that allow him to get into a position where he can compete in the entrepreneurial domain. Someone without his abilities and connections would not have been able to pursue the same path, even if his willpower and desire were the same.
The Nature of Wealth and Success
Throughout the novel, the narrator’s motivation for becoming rich is not explicitly expressed. He accumulates money, but there is rarely a sense that he is happy. The closest he comes are the hours he spends laughing with his son, or the rare interludes he experiences with the pretty girl (until their final years together, when he seems genuinely content). Despite his affluence, his wife leaves him, his siblings die, he is threatened with death more than once by a rival businessman, and he contracts cancer. By following 11 of the rules in his own book, he gains financial status, but not peace. But because he ignores the third rule and allows himself to fall in love, he spends his final years at his happiest with the pretty girl. In this way, Hamid invites readers to ponder questions of their own happiness, and how they would define true success.
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By Mohsin Hamid
