Biblio Breakdown: Exit West

Intimacy and point of view come alive in this must-read from Mohsin Hamid.

In this installment of Biblio Breakdown, we'll explore voice and intimacy in point of view in Mohsin Hamid's Exit West.

Before we begin our analysis, I'll quote the book blurb so we have a little bit of context as we move forward.

In a country teetering on the brink of civil war, two young people meet—sensual, fiercely independent Nadia and gentle, restrained Saeed. They embark on a furtive love affair, and are soon cloistered in a premature intimacy by the unrest roiling their city. When it explodes, turning familiar streets into a patchwork of checkpoints and bomb blasts, they begin to hear whispers about doors—doors that can whisk people far away, if perilously and for a price. As the violence escalates, Nadia and Saeed decide that they no longer have a choice. Leaving their homeland and their old lives behind, they find a door and step through...

If that sounds fascinating, it's because it is. Exit West is one of the best books I've read in the last few years, so please do yourself the favor of picking it up. You don't have to take my word for it, though: it was named best book of the year (or listed among them) by the New York Times, NPR, TIME, GQ, O The Oprah Magazine—you name it, they loved it.

Biblio Breakdowns aren't means as reviews or recommendations, though, so let's get technical, beginning with point of view.

Point of View

In other blog posts, I've explored the various types of point of view: first, second, and third (limited and omniscient). Choosing the point of view to employ in any given manuscript is a major choice; it's the lens through which readers will access the story, and each point of view lends itself to varying degrees of intimacy between the reader and the perspective characters.

In Exit West, Mohsin Hamid employs the third-person omniscient point of view, through which readers have access to all of the thoughts and feelings of any character at any given time. Personally, I steer clear of omniscience in my own writing for a few reasons.

Let's take a look at what those reasons are before examining why Hamid's choice to use the third-person omniscient was, despite my qualms with the use of omniscience more broadly, an absolutely brilliant choice for this book.

Mystery, Suspense, and Dramatic Irony

Regular readers of my blog probably roll their eyes at the above header; it describes topics I've covered a few times in other posts, too. These are, however, crucial to consider when developing a scene or examining a character's arc.

When writing in the third person, I prefer to employ the third-person limited perspective, as it tends toward increased mystery and suspense. How? Simply by the virtue of only giving readers access to the feelings and inner machinations of a single character. That is to say, in any scene, we only know what our perspective character knows (suspense), and sometimes our perspective character knows things that haven't yet been shared with the reader (mystery).

In this way, readers don't know what the true intentions of other characters might be: whether they've actually forgotten our perspective character's birthday, for example, or if they've actually planned a surprise party and their "forgetfulness" is all part of an elaborate ruse.

Setups like the above create suspense for the reader, something that can be lost in total omniscience. Granted, this argument could be construed as a bit of a straw man, since authors who employ omniscience could choose not to provide this secondary character's true intentions to the reader.

That, however, is another one of my qualms with omniscience: it gives authors the ability to be inconsistent in or withholding about what they share at any given time, which, in my view at least, gives the author too much power over a story that is, ultimately, about characters and their experiences.

In Exit West, Mohsin Hamid dodges any tendency toward inconsistency or penchant for being withholding, and he does so by going full-on with his omniscience. We get to know what both of our perspective characters are thinking and feeling, even if we don't get to know it immediately.

"Whoa, wait," you might say. "Isn't the whole deal with omniscience that we get to know who's thinking what and when they're thinking it, any time they're thinking it?"

Well, sure. Yeah. But given the linear presentation of content in a novel*, as writers we're limited to only truly be presenting the thoughts and feelings of one given character (or group of like-minded characters) at a single point in time.

Though this may feel like a limitation (and it often is), Hamid uses it to his advantage countless times throughout Exit West. The most prevalent examples of this, I feel, are when he spends short spurts inside of Saeed's head, expressing his doubts and his concerns about his relationship with Nadia. The questions he raises put us on the same page as Saeed, and they help foment a strong sense of suspense since the answers to those questions aren't known to the reader when they're asked.

Then, however, Hamid uses that suspense as fuel to push us into Nadia's thoughts, where we learn she's often thinking along similar lines as Saeed. In fact, sometimes Nadia's thoughts would answer Saeed's questions or quell his doubts, which converts that feeling of suspense readers had earlier into dramatic irony. Readers can now think to themselves, "Oh, Saeed, if only you knew what I know!"

This conversion of suspense to dramatic irony is a great way to use the third person omniscient point of view, in my opinion. It works especially well in Exit West, where our two primary point of view characters would stand to benefit if only they just talked about these things a bit more.

I mean, they do talk about them from time to time, but in nowhere near as forthcoming of a way as they express their inner thoughts on the same topics. This also means that when the two characters are conversing but not quite expressing themselves clearly or being 100% honest, we as readers again are presented with more dramatic irony.

Exercise: Pick one of your favorite scenes from your work in progress, preferably something that features both your main character and their antagonist, or your main character and their love interest, for example. How would the scene change if readers were privy to the thoughts of the non-perspective character? How would the scene change if each character knew what the other knew?

Thinking about this "information economy" can help us better understand our characters themselves, and also create greater tension for readers who might be wondering the same things.

Caution: though after doing this exercise you may be tempted to tease bits of information that's only known to a non-perspective character, be sure to avoid head-hopping if you're writing in a third-person limited perspective.

If you're unfamiliar with head-hopping, we'll cover it in the next section, so strap in.