Why you shouldn't writing in the 2nd person - and a good new Yorker Story by Mohsin Hamid

Thank you, Jay McInerney and Junot Diaz, but can we just put a moratorium on 2nd person narrative? Despite Mohsin Hamid's current New Yorker story, The third-Born that insists on addressing me, the reader, as "you," I have to tell you I am not and never will be a third-born child born in a mid-eastern or Asian (country undefined) village and raised in poverty by a mom mostly single while dad is off in nearby city for most of the year earning a meager living as a domestic cook and sending the money home to support the family. No, that's not "me," but it's the protagonist in Hamid's story - and quibbles about the narrative choice aside it's an excellent piece of writing (not a story most likely, as it ends quite abruptly and there are references throughout to the future life of the young protagonist - who grow up to become wealthy somewhere somehow). One of the great things that fiction does for all readers is provides access to the consciousness of another - and also to the details of daily life of other people and other cultures. Hamid's piece, short though it is, is a vivid account of the poverty of the rural village, with the young boy near death at the outset from various diseases and infections, and you get the sense both of the tenuousness of life (for the young especially) in these impoverished conditions and the insularity of the families (they live in a family compound in a village). The essence of the story is the journey, strapped Romney-style to the roof of one of those crazy, careening third-world buses, from village into new domicile, equally impoverished, in the city, where family will try for some independence from the clan - the new surroundings all seen in sharp detail by the young boy who marvels at seeing for the first time paved roads, traffic, electricity. It would seem this story has been told before - and I guess Naipaul has touched on these moments and emotions, and so has the under-appreciated Rohinton Mistry - but Hamid tells the story with a great deal of precision; if this story is part of a novel-to-come, I think it will be well worth reading.