The Hypebeast by Adnan Khan

As a title, The Hypebeast, will mean nothing to many people. And, for select others, something highly specific.

Historically, Hypebeast is a sales-oriented company website (a “leading online destination for men’s contemporary fashion and streetwear”; the “definitive daily source for fashion, footwear, music, arts, and a diverse range of subjects that shape our everyday lives”) that evolved from former Vancouver resident Kevin Ma’s blog devoted to athletic footwear, which launched in 2005; and even then, “hypebeast” was slang for a (male, typically) trend-chaser. 

Funnily enough, the title Adnan Khan’s novel is something of a deke. Fetishized sneaker brands/models don’t figure all that much throughout. And neither, for that matter, does fashion. Kevin Ma, fictionalized or otherwise, is nowhere to be seen. Ditto for Vancouver. 

As a derogatory term, hypebeast connotes someone who’s overly materialistic and facile—and who’s hollow, a shell. There’s something of that in the novel, whose protagonist, Hamid, dreams of more and more—stuff, power, credibility, visibility, respect. In a small time rut, he imagines big time ambitions will eventually land him at the top of the heap. To my knowledge, Khan hasn’t listed Brian De Palma’s Scarface as one of his inspirations, but it’s easy to imagine Hamid seeing Tony Montana’s will to power as both a philosophy to live by and a cautionary tale. 

In the copy of the novel sent out to reviewers, Torontonian Khan (There Has to Be a Knife) describes his book as a “crime caper, tragedy, black comedy, apology; inspired by Orhan Pamuk, Guy Ritchie, and our moment.” (For those wondering “but which Guy Ritchie?” as I did, Khan is decidedly not referring to the director’s Aladdin, Swept Away, or King Arthur; stylish English gangster capers Revolver, Snatch, and Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels—and maybe that music video for “What It Feels Like for a Girl,” by Ritchie’s ex-wife Madonna—seem closer to the mark.) Tragicomic caper apologia is a lot to stuff into any novel, never mind adding in the stylized tough guy posturing of Ritchie flicks and the cerebral historical meditations of Turkish Nobel laureate Pamuk. Nevertheless, readers unaware of the genres and influences that Khan names can count on being awed and impressed by the book’s representational breadth. It’s a big book that no one will ever accuse of timidity.

A sprinting novel with sweeping scope, The Hypebeast excels at portraiture, which begins and ends with Hamid telling us what he sees and feels. He remains a sympathetic narrator even as his choices, impulses, actions, and networking—unified in their quest for easy money, top shelf liquors, and luxury goods—push him inexorably toward danger and violence. Chekhov’s gun is there in spirit: “We are going to mess this place up,” Hamid’s closest friend Marwan jokes in an Airbnb at the beginning of the Toronto-set tale. Little does he know where he’ll wind up.

The novel opens with Hamid at the Oberoi hotel in Bombay (“the cluttered city, the cutthroat city” where he was born), where he’s feeling reflective. Muslims are on his mind. In particular, he wonders how the former conquerors now sell shawarma and how they transformed from “emperors to 7/11.” 

He then recalls his “last stab at greatness”— back when he hadn’t yet learned to be honest with himself and when he mistakenly believed “if I wasn’t applying force onto the world I was dead.”

The novel ends nearly 400 pages later with Hamid’s return to the incomprehensibly vast city, where he’s become “a noiseless gear in the machine.”

He visits his mother and sulkily imagines the ad he’d submit to attract a suitable wife:

FUCK UP AVAIL, SAYS HE’S 5’10’, DARK-SKINNED, NO JOB, NO REAL PROSPECTS, ODD FAMILY DYNAMICS, PROLONGED PSYCHOLOGICAL PROBLEMS, A TOTAL WASTE OF HIS PARENTS’ JOURNEY WESTWARD, LOOKING FOR A WIFE TO BLAME; CASTE NO BAR, ABRAHAMIC RELIGION PREFERRED. ILLITERATE INDIAN; MUST SPEAK ENGLISH

He jests, to a degree, but his return to India isn’t a victory lap. 

Back in Toronto, Hamid recalls, Khan’s sharp-witted, sharp tongued 28-year-old go-getter—hustler, to be less kind but perhaps more accurate—releases himself from two years of “brute-force telephone sales work” (hated it but learned to sell) to run assorted scams followed by a weekend ritual: “downtown treks to obliterate ourselves at clubs.”

Like Snatch, The Hypebeast has to be experienced to be appreciated—and that also means Khan’s book is both harmed and lessened by plot summary. Suffice it to say, Hamid, defined by two phrases (“I want to make money,” and “I could not have not my father’s life”), senses a distinct lack of opportunity with his self-made schemes (“small things,” “tiny moves”) and spies on a mysterious figure and “aspiring crime lord” nicknamed the Arab. Despite sensing that the Arab is “a failed rich kid, last in line to inherit an empire, kept out of sight from a disappointed father,” Hamid supposes that a close association with him with can—must—conclude with upward mobility.

He’s not entirely correct, and before anything else, he’s offered a caper that will serve as his job interview. With muscle-bound Marwan, Hamid needs to steal Bagheera, a geriatric jaguar with a diet of frozen Costco chickens that resides in a suburban home that doubles as an illegal zoo.

When the episode finishes with a lost limb, the comedy turns to horror. Having proved his reliability and loyalty, however, Hamid is rewarded. Money, benefits, the good life: even though they’re never quite in reach, Hamid is enthralled. Still living on the “crumbs of illegality,” he craves more. 

And, eventually, that appetite pushes him toward men who appall him and to locations of torture and murder. 

All the while, he’s a narrator with a gift for observation and a pensive temperament that dwells on everything from masculinity and family to being brown-skinned and Muslim in Canada, with its veneer of tolerance. 

Funny, harrowing, propulsive, and tumbling with big ideas and beguiling detours, the novel rouses intrigues, and edifies with its hypebeast protagonist whose complexity, desires, and contradictions ultimately suggest the need for a better descriptor for a guy who is so much more than consumer that likes to shop for limited edition runners and thousand-dollar shirts. 

Brett Josef Grubisic

Brett Josef Grubisic resides on Salt Spring Island, BC, where he's currently at war with his sixth novel. Previous novels include The Age of Cities and My Two-Faced Luck.