Hamid is, then, in some respects critiquing the globalizing of media and culture that his own novel is a part of. Yet he also attempts to mitigate the functionalist view through a renewed attention to story making. The Reluctant Fundamentalist in fact performs the manipulation of literature through globalization via its consideration of authorship and the literary. This manipulation can first be seen in the fate of the novel’s creative writer, Erica. We could say that Erica represents the unsuccessful writer, the one who fails to reconcile herself to contemporary market realities. Her excitement at acquiring a literary agent is not at first tempered by his warning that the novella—her preferred form—is “a platypus of a beast” and notoriously difficult to market (87). Yet as her psychological problems mount, she can no longer find refuge in writing and ignores her agent’s calls: “I used to turn to it, my writing, when I needed to get something out that was stuck inside. But I can’t get it out now. It pulls me in, you know? I dwell on it instead of writing it” (111–12).

DEFINE: Erica functions as a character type: the unsuccessful writer crushed by psychological burden and indifferent to commercial demands, contrasting with the novel's own negotiation of globalized literary markets.

Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, loc. 462