The Last White Man
By Mohsin Hamid
The Last White Man is about change. Sure, the inciting incident is the literal shifting of white bodies to dark, but there are so many other mental, spiritual, and emotional changes that take place through Anders’ and Oona’s journeys. I went into this thinking that the most important takeaway would be some societal message. Instead, the titular last white man and interpersonal relationships within “the town” are what continue to stick with me. The white people of the novel can’t grasp what being non-white would mean until it happens to them, and Mohsin Hamid spends no time pretending they would immediately find that understanding when their bodies change. The writing of the book is itself engaging with that message by not standing on a soap box and preaching to an audience that’s already made up their minds.
The larger conversation that the novel begins with, “what if all the white people began to wake up in dark skinned bodies?”, continues only until necessary. There isn’t a lot of time spent listening to politicians discuss what must be done, how society as a whole shifts from better to worse, or vice versa. There are snippets of conservative talk shows, internet forums, or violence in the streets, but most of the time is spent seeing how the main character’s lives are directly affected. Anders is more concerned with how his new body will make the men at his job feel than the ramifications this shift has for society as a whole. When riots break out, Oona spends more time parsing her instinct to help a black family escape danger than she spends in the actual riot itself. It’s fascinating to see how their empathy grows over the course of the novel from a perspective that remains self-centered at all times.
Hamid’s speculative fiction works without issue largely because he doesn’t try to explain why any of it’s happening. You may wonder why all the white bodies are changing, but that question is soon replaced with others. How will Anders’ personal struggle change the relationship with his father, especially as his father’s health declines and they depend on each other more as time goes on. Will Oona’s mother survive as a hysterically bigoted woman in a world where bigotry is being undone by the lack of difference in a person’s appearance? Is Oona finally able to grieve her brother now that societal pressure is no longer crushing her into false productivity? You can see all of the unspoken truths come to light for the characters once their experience shifts, and there is a beauty to the healing they finally manage now that they’re no longer required to behave the way they’ve been conditioned.
I can’t do this novella justice without saying everything that happens. It’s short enough to zip through in a weekend and the audiobook narrator is my favorite kind: the author themself. This book has so much beauty in such a short period of time. I will always remember things like Oona’s conversation at the DMV, the barista’s tattoos, the actual last white man, and the final pages of the novel. As badly as I want to talk about how wonderful those moments are, I’ll leave that for someone else to do in hopes that anyone reading this can experience it in their own time.