American and British Studies Annual (Dec 2014)
A pre-9/11 novel: Kapitoil by Teddy Wayne
Abstract
Kapitoil is a 2010 novel by American writer Teddy Wayne. In accordance with the author’s view that any novel narrated in the first person should be labelled “idiosyncratic,” this work certainly offers such a voice. The novel is narrated by a young Muslim man from Qatar who arrives in New York to work as a computer programmer in a major US corporation. His status of an “ultranerd,” cultural outsider and ESL learner makes for most of the humour of the book. However, at its core are serious questions concerning cultural clash, capitalism, globalisation and morality, as – set in 1999, and depicting a character with a vision which becomes drastically revised – Kapitoil provides a background to the current economic crisis. The author calls it “a pre-9/11 novel.” In the paper I examine this new label by locating the novel against the post-9/11 genre and its emergent “second generation,” the so-called postcolonial post-9/11 novel exemplified by Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007).
