ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a detailed overview of the novel's critical and popular success and its countering commercial positioning within the canon of 9/11 novels, which highlights some existing boundaries that have circumscribed the literary telling of the catastrophe. It analyses how the novel inserts sensible interventions into that delimitation by disrupting the broader prevailing politics of identity and sensory experiences. In order to consider The Reluctant Fundamentalist as a cultural resistance project, it is important to examine briefly how other literary works have engaged with 9/11. The fundamentalism in the title actually has more relevance for Changez's belief in and practice of a set of financial principles espoused by the elite New York based financial services firm for which he worked prior to 9/11. It is a rival American capitalistic fundamentalism that mandates a single-minded attention to maximum productivity, ever-increasing profit, and progress.
