Summary
Narrated in the third person by an unnamed omniscient narrator, The Last White Man opens with the protagonist, Anders, waking up to discover that his white skin has turned “a deep and undeniable brown.” Anders believes at first that his own body might be that of another man who is in bed with him, but he uses his phone camera as a mirror to confirm that he is alone—the brown limbs belong to him.
Anders goes to his bathroom and looks in the mirror. Anders feels a murderous rage toward his own image, wanting “to kill the colored man who confronted him.” He smashes the mirror with his fist and returns to bed. Anders cannot help but continually check himself using his phone as a mirror, even loading a photo of himself into his digital image gallery; the algorithm does not recognize him.
Anders calls in sick to work the first and second days, then tells his boss he will be sick all week. When he runs out of chicken, tuna, and milk, Anders drives his mother’s old car to the grocery store, a cap pulled low over his forehead. Three white people seem to glance at him at the store, but afterward he doesn’t know if they noticed anything; he could just be paranoid. A white woman honks her horn at him when he is distracted by his image in the rearview mirror; he wishes there was some way he could tell her he is also white.
He smokes pot upon returning home and becomes filled with anxiety, putting off eating his lunch until dinner. He would like to speak with his mother, a grade-school teacher, but she died of cancer. People always used to compliment his smile, which he inherited from her. That smile is gone now, and Anders doesn’t know if it will ever return.
In Chapter Two, the point of view switches to that of Oona. She recently moved back to town to help her mother through the grief over Oona’s recently deceased twin, whose addiction issues resulted in his death. Anders and Oona were attracted to each other in high school, and have recently reconnected. When Anders calls, Oona thinks mostly of herself and her need to detach from Anders’s problems, but she agrees to go to see him after she teaches her class that day. After work, she cycles from the wealthier part of town to the poorer, passing derelict storefronts and homeless people. Oona knocks on the flimsy door of Anders’s home, which is a single room, like a cabin or a ground floor that leads up to nothing else. The place is tidy and organized, full of books because Anders has always been a bookish person.
When she sees Anders’s brown skin, Oona confirms that he does look like an utterly different person. Anders tears up and then offers her a joint. She smokes with him. Eventually he nods toward his bed and asks her to stay. Oona is unnerved by his appearance, and also by how wounded and vulnerable he is being, but she goes to his bed. They undress and come together cautiously. The narrator comments that because Anders works at a gym and Oona teaches yoga, they have young, fit bodies. They each enjoy watching themselves having sex, the dark-skinned stranger and the white woman.
After sex, there is a strange lingering sense of betrayal that makes it hard for either to fall asleep. Oona leaves in the middle of the night, riding home to her mother’s house. In the morning, she sees she has a message from Anders; she ignores it. She makes her mother a healthy breakfast and checks her mother’s various medications. Her mother suddenly says that she heard online that “our people” are changing—white people. Oona tells her not to believe everything she hears online. The narrator comments that Oona’s mother only had only become a “fantasist” after her good life was destabilized by the sudden death of her husband and the slow death of her son. The world looked increasingly dangerous to her, the people who came to work on her home increasingly “weird.” When Oona leaves on her bike, her mother says, “You’re so beautiful. You should get a gun.”
The point of view returns to Anders. He keeps his hoodie up to avoid notice. While he doesn’t experience any direct hostility from anyone, he can tell when people give him extra space on sidewalks. Anders is disturbed when he meets the eyes of another dark person and senses a casual, human recognition. Anders puts off telling his father, eventually phoning to drop the news as he had with Oona. His father demands he come over to show him. His father is a construction foreman who refuses to see doctors despite being “ill to his core.” His father grabs Anders by the sleeve when he sees him and weeps, shuddering. He takes him inside the house and they sit down.
That week Oona makes the three-hour drive back to the city to visit with a friend. They go out drinking and dancing; Oona considers going home with a guy, but makes excuses not to. She sleeps on her friend’s floor and gets up at dawn to drive back in time to teach her noon class. She and Anders message a bit that week, just enough for Oona not to seem cold. In reality, she is less comfortable with his situation than she is letting on.
Meanwhile, there are reports emerging that people all around the country are changing as Anders has. While the reports are dismissed as preposterous at first, eventually there is more and more confirmation. When Oona’s mother points out that it is now being reported on television, and shows Oona an interview with a formerly white person, Oona phones Anders. She asks how it feels to know he isn’t alone. After a long pause, he says, “Not worse.” The way he says it sounds to Oona “like an invitation.”
Analysis
In the opening chapters of The Last White Man, author Mohsin Hamid introduces the major themes of white privilege, grief, racial prejudice, and race as a social construct. With the first paragraph, Hamid establishes the novel’s absurd premise with an allusion to Franz Kafka’s iconic surrealist novella The Metamorphosis. In Kafka’s nightmarish tale, Gregor Samsa wakes up one morning to discover that he has inexplicably transformed into a giant insect. For Hamid’s protagonist, Anders, the transformation is racial, as Anders wakes up to discover he is no longer white but an “undeniable brown.”
Although Hamid supplies few details about the unnamed country in which Anders lives, it is clear that the majority of the population is white, and there is a minority of “brown” or “dark” people (Hamid never uses the term Black to describe the dark-skinned people in the book). The characters' names suggest that the country is Northern European. From Anders’s response to his change, the reader gets the sense that Anders does not welcome the change. While Anders is not explicitly a racist in the way other characters are depicted as being, his initial reaction to his own image is a “murderous rage” and the desire to punch his reflection—a symbol of his submerged racism coming to the surface.
Anders then responds to his changed skin color by hiding it, as though ashamed. When he does finally venture out, he wishes he could communicate to white people that he is—or was—white himself, as though chasing the social advantages he has lost. This sense of loss is shared by his father, who shudders at the sight of his transformed son.
While Anders has violent and mournful reactions to his changed color, his lover, Oona, finds herself torn between feelings of attraction and aversion. Initially, she is reluctant to get involved in Anders’s emotional drama; however, once at his home, she finds herself enjoying the image of her white body making love to his dark body. But she grows uncomfortable again and senses she has committed some vague betrayal. With this oscillation, Hamid shows how Oona grapples with her own racism against the superficially unfamiliar version of Anders.
The theme of societal collapse arises with the introduction of Oona’s mother, who embraces right-wing prejudice against non-white people. The narrator comments that Oona’s mother became vulnerable to conspiracy theories after the deaths of her husband and son. Traumatized by such dramatic confrontations with mortality, Oona’s mother seeks the reassurance offered by conspiracy theories that offer participants a sense of control over life. With her embrace of the notion that there is a violent plot to displace white people by turning everyone brown, Oona’s mother is a harbinger of the paranoia-induced social upheaval to come.
