A great account of life in a country in the throes of civil war - but where is Hamid's narrative headed?

Mohsin Hamid's short novel Exit West (2017) is above all a terrific account of what it's like to live in a city under siege; curiously, Hamid never names the city, but from various clues - the influx and outflow of refugees, the ongoing civil war in the streets, the strict Islam society and government - we can sense that he has in mind Damascus or perhaps another Syrian city, but let's just leave it generic, as that's Hamid's approach. We see the city through the eyes of a young couple - Saeed and Nadia - trying to build a relationship in increasingly and terrifyingly difficult circumstances. N is unusual and a bit of a pariah as a young woman unmarried living alone; S. is much more conventional, living w/ his parents even though he has a pretty good job. When he visits N he has to don the black robes and sneak into her place as if he's her sister; over the course of the first half of the novel they encounter a wave of hardships, including collapse of the economy, need to hard supplies, cut off of almost all communication, crackdown on any violation of Islamic law, ever-present street fighting that, ultimately, drives people to block of all windows (such as by moving bookcases to cover the openings) for fear of shattered glass. Despite all this, life goes on to a degree: it seems surprisingly easy to get hold of marijuana and "mushrooms," S and N still able see each other (a traditionalist, he actually refuses to have sex w/ her until they're married), for a time there are still movies and restaurants. I've read no other novel that so effectively and w/ seeming veracity puts us right into the street life of a country in civil war. That said: for some odd reason Hamid is uneasy w/ making this a straightforward narrative, as he breaks the chain w/ a few paragraphs here and there about other seemingly completely unrelated people in other continents: someone in Japan, Australia, maybe in California if my memory serves? Why? Unless there's a big payoff, these asides don't add value. Further, I know that part of this novel was excerpted in the NYer a year or so ago, and I remember that the published section included some weird kind of magic realism: N and S pay to escape their homeland and migrate I think to Europe, and this section is treated as passage from a magic hall of mirrors or something (haven't yet come to this point in the novel). Why would he do that? Why not stay w/ his excellent, realistic narrative approach? 

To order a copy of "25 Posts from Elliot's Reading: Selections from the first 2,500 blog entries," click here.