Tales from Londonistan: Hanif Kureishi’s ‘Something To Tell You’

Multicultural London has emerged as one of fiction’s great subjects in the last 20 years, and Hanif Kureishi has led the way. Edgier than Zadie Smith, and more lively than Monica Ali, Mr. Kureishi has nonetheless not had a hit in recent years. “The Buddha of Suburbia” (1990), his first book, probably remains his most-read, and he is most famous for a still earlier achievement, his screenplay for “My Beautiful Laundrette” (1985). Earlier this year, some English critics hailed his new novel, “Something To Tell You” (Scribner, 376 pages, $26), as a return to form. It is certainly a tour de force — but a far from perfect one.Mr. Kureishi’s plot is not simple. Jamal, an English-born Pakistani psychoanalyst of some renown, tells the story of his life, moving at will between his present as an affluent professional living in the less-than-posh London neighborhood of Shepherd’s Green and his past as a sometimes delinquent student.In the present, he has a host of problems, but none of them seem particularly urgent. Recently separated from his wife, he contentedly fist-bumps with his son, and eventually tells him, in a moment of fatherly largesse, that divorce will be his destiny, too. That is a curse, he tries to clarify, but for most of the book he has been thinking about other sexual opportunities, preaching the centrality of desire, its manifold forms, the “madness” at the center of human civilization. An outspoken Freudian when he appears on TV, he believes that pleasure is the basic human good.His other main concern is the intense new relationship between his sister, Miriam, and his longtime best friend, Henry. Miriam and Henry are easily the most interesting characters in what is, top to bottom, a character-driven novel.Henry, an ambitious theater director who has lately turned on to marijuana as he once turned on to Ibsen and Ionesco, certainly doesn’t condescend to Miriam, the self-described lesbian Muslim single mother; clearly she impresses him. Both of these characters, to Mr. Kureishi’s credit, are much too big to be stereotypes: Henry’s brilliant egotism involves a lot of openness and generosity. And Miriam’s outré household, a nest of fatherless children managed by Bushy, a small-time crook who doubles as her driver, nonetheless resembles a typical middle-class home in many of its little rituals and its nonchalant chaos. Miriam is tattooed, multiply pierced, and obese. Henry, too, is big; he is commanding, a speechifier, and engagingly confessional.But this story line is just how Mr. Kureishi plates the main dish: a look back to the 1970s, to the turmoil and radicalization that ended, ultimately, in Thatcherism. Jamal and his two best friends of the period, Valentin and Wolf, both hailing from Europe, engage in petty burglary and watch TV; they also debate philosophy, and Jamal, as a university student, has a walk-on part in a number of typical scenes: collective meetings, picket lines, parties. The inevitable dissonance inside his head is implied, but not bemoaned. Mr. Kureishi turns it into a kind allegory: Jamal falls in love with Ajita, a pretty Pakistani girl whose father happens to be a sweatshop owner who becomes the target-célèbre of leftist London.Much has been written lately about Britain’s difficult transitions from radicalism to Thatcher to New Labour, and the novelists Alan Hollinghurst, Jonathan Coe, and Hari Kunzru have all covered this territory of late. Mr. Kureishi is not the least of these storytellers, but he does little to make the story fresh. And what matters most to him is not history, but the melodrama of Jamal’s youth. Jamal deals with Ajita’s “capitalist” father in a violent way that he keenly regrets, and the persistent urge to tell his story becomes something of a crutch for his narration: “It was time for me to describe, to myself, what happened the night I could bear no more and finally decided to take action. I needed to go back there, as I knew I would always have to, over and over again.”The talking cure is Mr. Kureishi’s madness and his method. While reading “Something To Tell You,” I frequently wondered how it was written and revised, so fearlessly does Mr. Kureishi put his tale down on paper, paragraph by paragraph. Never confusing, the smaller units of his story unfold with a confident freedom that goes back to the very earliest novels — in the raw productivity of his voice, Jamal recalls Moll Flanders. But for Mr. Kureishi, pacing is the problem. He entertains by bursts, but deadens in the long haul. Unlike Defoe, who probably never thought to carefully weave flashbacks into a colorful present-day story, Mr. Kureishi has saddled his creativity to a hackneyed overall structure. “Something To Tell You” dredges up a dark politico-emotional memory and forces it, needlessly, to justify with moral weight what could have been a simply brilliant tale of contemporary London.blytal@nysun.com

Tales from Londonistan: Hanif Kureishi’s ‘Something To Tell You’

Tales from Londonistan: Hanif Kureishi’s ‘Something To Tell You’

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