The Reluctant Fundamentalist--Allegory and Realism

Though I know this novel has a lot of symbolic and allegorical tilts, I always like to read beyond the allegorical. I think straight allegories are too contrived to be decent literature. I was glad that I could find a lot of the mundane, human aspects of the novel enjoyable and realistic. I did think Erica's perpetually wounded soul was a bit gratuitous, but I read it as the character's fault, so I appreciated it. I also liked the fact that Changez, though distinctly anti-American outside of the frame of his narrative, was still halfway holding out for Erica. Her nationality and the things which she stood for transcended his disgust of America, and it served to show he was not so strictly anti-American as he himself thought.