Business becomes his new religion. He realizes that if he is to become as successful as the pretty girl — who has become a well-known model who “earns as much as a retail banker her age” — he must become an entrepreneur. From a job as “a non-expired-labeled expired-goods salesman” (which means exactly what it sounds like, selling old items that have been relabeled with new expiration dates) he sets himself up as a bottled-water tycoon. What starts out as a small-time scam — pouring boiled tap water into mineral-water bottles recovered from restaurants — gradually evolves into a thriving big-time business, enabling “you” to ascend into the firmament of the wealthy with a big house, a driver and lots of security to protect him from the envious rabble.

As his first novel, “Moth Smoke,” so deftly demonstrated, Mr. Hamid has high-frequency radar for status distinctions, and in these pages he provides an acerbic, almost anthropological sense of how bribes and corruption grease the social system in his not-quite-Pakistan. He also records the envy, resentment and desire to emulate that America and the West provoke. For instance a retired brigadier describes his awe-making plan of creating a “premier housing” development that would have “its own electricity plant” (meaning, no blackouts) and drinkable tap water. When you enter it, “it’ll be like you’ve entered another country,” he says. “Another continent. Like you’ve gone to Europe. Or North America.”

In Mr. Hamid’s not-Pakistan-exactly, change has arrived in fits and starts: poverty and high-tech modernity exist side by side, turning the country into a patchwork of the old and new, and the ugly urban sprawl of the in-between.

“In the city’s outskirts,” Mr. Hamid writes, “on one of a thousand and one rutted streets where a few years ago were only fields but now little green can be seen, unplanned development having yielded instead a ribbon of convenience stores, auto garages, scrap-metal dealers, unregistered educational institutes, fly-by-night dental clinics and mobile-phone top-up and repair points, all fronting warrens of housing perilously unresistant to earthquakes, or even, for that matter, torrential rain.”

It is a measure of Mr. Hamid’s audacious talents that he manages to make his protagonist’s story work on so many levels. “You” is, at once, a modern-day Horatio Alger character, representing the desires and frustrations of millions in rising Asia; a bildungsroman hero, by turns knavish and recognizably human, who sallies forth from the provinces to find his destiny; and a nameless but intimately known soul, whose bittersweet romance with the pretty girl possesses a remarkable emotional power. With “How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia” Mr. Hamid reaffirms his place as one of his generation’s most inventive and gifted writers.