Mohsin Hamid’s sentences in Exit West flow like a brightly colored fly line from a fishing rod’s guides in long iridescent and undulating curves and loops that feel breathless in the way a storyteller would tell a story with only minutes to deliver the message at the end of a long run might do, but so focused on the brightly colored fly constructed of a hook wrapped with tinsel and feathers, forget to answer the underlying question of what about “these birds who had lost or would soon lose their trees to construction,” and even so manage to lure a fish to chase after the artificial fly and rise to break the surface of a different world.
