And so they return to his home--wherever it is--and she quickly falls in love with the whole shebang: the desert, his large, extended family who live in each others' back pockets, the welcoming embrace of Islam, the sense of belonging, for the first time, to a sisterhood of women who have a well-defined role in life, restrictive though it may be. She feels a sense of belonging and rootedness--the comforting warmth of feeling at home for the first time in her life. Conversely, he finds this world stifling, limiting and unbeareable, and wants nothing more than to escape as soon as possible to the West. Quelle ironie!

Verdict: The Pick-Up is most assuredly a pre-9/11 novel. It describes a world in which Islamic animosity towards the West seems to not exist and Muslim extremism is not a factor. Every young Muslim male with any ambition is anxious to make his mark in North America or Europe; there is never any sense that a young Muslim male might be susceptible to the competing siren-call of Islamism. In other words, it is a fantasy, a sanitized, romanticised version of reality that could have only be devised by a Western writer either unaware of or unconcerned about the genuine tensions and clashes between Islam and the West.

Book Two: Reading Lolita in Teheran, by Azar Nafisi

The only non-fiction book of the four, Reading Lolita is Arar Nafisi's account of the horror of living in an Islamist dystopia--the Islamic Republic of Iran. Nafisi, who had left Iran with her family years before and had lived and been educated in the U.S., returned to Iran in the wake of the Khomeini revolution. She was a radical leftist, a professor of English literate, who foolishly thought because both the leftists and Islamists had a common enemy--the Shah--that the revolution would bring freedom and positive change to her country. She learned soon enough what it really meant--religious police ensuring women in public were wearing identity-obliterating full body sacks and thought police ensuring people eschewed "dangerous" Western ideas and towed the Ayatollah's religious line.

Life in a repressive Islamist regime was not what Nafisi had in mind. Surprisingly, she was able to keep teaching for a time, even though the books she taught were seen as examples of decadent Western culture. Eventually, she had to stop completely. To preserve her sanity and as an act of definance, she invited a few of her favorite female students to join a book group. Every few weeks, these disparate women met in Nafisi's home to discuss a different world of fiction--Lolita, Pride and Prejudice, Washington Square, and many others. The mere possession of these works might have earned them a death sentence; meeting secretly on many occasions over time to discuss them placed them, potentially, in great peril. But the risk was worth it, because the book group was like an oasis--a place where their minds and personalities could flourish, however briefly, in a harsh, bleak world.