Cleverly, Hamid sets “How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia” in an unnamed country, stripping away almost every signifier save a few that suggest we are in Pakistan. No mangoes, no mullahs, no preconceived notions. Defamiliarizing Pakistan also obviates another criticism. “Although globalization is universally acknowledged as one of the most pressing issues of our time, it has usually proved a poor subject for fiction,” the writer Siddhartha Deb observes. Too many books exhibit “an endless fascination for pop-culture trivia, poststructuralist meta-theories and self-referential irony.” With only a few props — an assault rifle, a packet of milk, a white radish — and only the slightest tinge of tear gas in the air, the novel feels mythic, eternal rather than frenetic. And the bare stage is the best showcase for the narrator’s one-man show.

Hamid, like Kazuo Ishiguro, specializes in voices in transition, split at the root, straining for cultivation and tripping over clumsy constructions. This narrator speaks to us in two tongues, in self-help’s slick banalities and the bewilderment of the striver. He’s magnificently fraudulent and full of uses; he swoops in to do exposition, pans away to turn prophetic or play sociologist (“You witness a passage of time that outstrips its chronological equivalent. Just as when headed into the mountains a quick shift in altitude can vault one from subtropical jungle to semi-arctic tundra, so too can a few hours on a bus from rural remoteness to urban centrality appear to span millennia”). He can be chilling and chummy, and very hard to shake. Some of the book’s more serious sections, on mortality, say, are imbued with a vestigial phoniness, and a self-referential ode to storytelling has the soul-lessness of a TED talk. It’s a shame; Hamid is a stronger, stranger writer than that.

Witness the final reversal. The book ends with you, the hero, in your eighth decade, a Gatsby we never knew: an old man in a hotel room, trying to remember to take your medicines regularly. And as it turns out, there is still something left to learn, something more vital than how to get Filthy Rich. You teach us how to lose. How to relinquish health and hope; how to surrender assets to thieving relatives and one’s children to America. “Slough off your wealth, like an animal molting in the autumn,” Hamid writes. Look up the pretty girls of your youth. Find someone to play cards with. “Have an exit strategy.”