Rahman uses his novel to think hard about class, knowledge, and belonging. Illustration by David Despau

There is a difference between knowingness and knowledge, but what is it? Knowingness comes after knowledge; it is only the echo of its source, and it is proud to be the echo. One of the liberties of our connected age is that we can be almost infinitely knowing, consoling our lack of true knowledge with an easy cynicism of acquisition. It is cheaply glorious to be able to discover almost any fact about the world on the machine I am using to write this review: I experience that liberty as the reward it is, and also as a punishment; as both a gift of the digital world and a judgment on my scant acquaintance with the actual world.

Speak for yourself, you may say. Who is this “we,” so easily invoked? If knowingness is capitalism’s gift to those metropolitan élites who haven’t earned it, there are also multitudes of people, constrained by poverty and political oppression and the bad luck of obscurity, who don’t deserve the brutal “knowledge” that is being meted out daily on their lives; they would be very grateful for the privileges of knowingness. And, by the way, would you, in Paris or New York or London, really rather know less, as the price of being less knowing?

Zia Haider Rahman’s first novel, “In the Light of What We Know” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), prompts such thoughts, and in some ways dramatizes them. It is a novel unashamed by many varieties of knowledge—its characters talk, brilliantly, about mathematics, philosophy, exile and immigration, warfare, Wall Street and financial trading, contemporary geopolitics, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Afghanistan, English and American society, Islamic terrorism, Western paternalism, Oxford and Yale. It is a novel that displays a formidable familiarity with élite knowledge, and takes for granted a capacity for both abstract and worldly thinking. Its author, at first sight, would appear to be an exhausting overachiever: born in rural Bangladesh, educated at Oxford, Cambridge, Munich, and Yale, he has worked, the publisher’s note tells us, as “an investment banker on Wall Street and as an international human-rights lawyer.” His novel runs to almost five hundred pages; in addition to dense footnotes, nearly every chapter totters, like some hydrocephalic embodiment of erudition, from the weight of two or three long epigraphs (from Edward Said, Saul Smilansky, Freud, V. S. Naipaul, Cicero, Simone Weil, Dante, John Donne, George Eliot, and the like).

Yet, while “In the Light of What We Know” is full of knowledge, it is never merely knowing. It wears its knowledge heavily, as a burden, a crisis, an injury. This is because Rahman is interested in the possession of knowledge, and in the politics of that possession. Who gets to be called “educated,” and why? And what does knowledge, in a place like Yale or Oxford (or a city like New York or London), really consist of? Why should three or four years studying classics or economics, in élite and antique corridors, be a qualification for, say, running an N.G.O. in Kabul, or talking authoritatively about radical Islamism or human rights in Pakistan? Rahman is deeply suspicious of our claim to know things, and his long novel attempts to tell us, again and again, that we know much less than we think we do, that intellectual modesty in the face of mystery and complexity may be the surest wisdom. He is painfully attuned to the irony that his novel imparts this lesson of necessary ignorance by simultaneously imparting a lot of knowledge. But there is also a religious irony, of sorts: knowledge is what we have to go through, what we have to consume, in order to be finally consumed—in order to understand how little we knew.

Rahman is extremely privileged, but he wasn’t always. He was born not in the Bangladeshi capital, Dhaka, but in a rural village, a place perhaps described by a phrase in this novel: “a corner of that corner of the world—if a corner can have a corner.” He came to England as a small boy, after the 1971 war for independence. According to the Guardian, his father worked as a London bus conductor; Rahman spent some time squatting in “a derelict building in Marylebone, before moving to a council estate” (subsidized housing). But he earned a place at Oxford, where he studied mathematics; one can only imagine the paroxysms of distance suffered by the young student, as he attempted to measure the gap between his life with his immigrant parents and his life at Balliol College, one of the wealthiest and most entitled of the Oxford colleges. A generation or two after V. S. Naipaul made the long journey from Trinidad to Oxford, Rahman reprised it—this time, perhaps, with class rather than race as the dominant embattlement. Yet, to judge from the sharply autobiographical atmosphere of this novel, the dialectic of sudden privilege was probably much as Naipaul had experienced it more than three decades earlier: the lucky recipient bound to judge his old home critically, seeing it, with fresh eyes, from the unjust luxury of his new home; bound also to judge his new home critically, seeing it from the unjust impoverishment of his old one; and now effectively estranged from either place.

Rahman novelizes this dynamic of homelessness by dividing the privilege and the obscurity between two very different fictional characters, now in their late forties, who met as students at Oxford in the nineteen-eighties, became good friends as young men, and then lost touch. (The novel is set in 2008, but travels back to the nineteen-eighties and nineties.) The book’s official narrator, who is nameless, was born into money and entitlement: he is the grandson of a former Pakistani Ambassador to the United States, and the son of an Oxford physicist. He attended the very English boarding school Eton, but is a comfortable global citizen. Born in Princeton in 1969 (his father was then at the university), he tells us that he feels American, though without any inconvenient patriotism; if he wanted, he could have three passports—American, British, Pakistani. When we first encounter him, in 2008, he lives in an expensive house in South Kensington, in London, and is about to be fired from his job as an investment banker, where he had been involved in trading “mortgage-backed securities, collateralized debt obligations, credit derivatives, and everything else that was now being laid for a bonfire.” He speaks a little pompously at times, and understands less than he thinks he does.

Like the novel’s narrator, the narrator’s friend Zafar went to Oxford, studied mathematics, and worked in finance. But Zafar’s origins are much closer to Zia Haider Rahman’s than to the narrator’s. It is Zafar who was born in “a corner of that corner of the world,” in a village in rural Bangladesh. He came to England when he was five; his parents, as he tells the narrator, were “peasants in the sense that connotes nothing pejorative.” In London, Zafar’s father worked as a bus conductor, then as a waiter. Posh Britons, imagining vaguely that he comes from India, assume that he grew up with servants. But wherever he lived, in Bangladesh or in London, his family, as he puts it, “were the staff.”