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Tuesday 2 December 2008

Something to Tell You

The return of Kureishi-man

D.J. Taylor reviews Hanif Kureishi's latest novel

Down at the novel’s core stirs a puzzle: what does Kureishi think of his characters? The comic possibilities offered up by this collection of reality-deniers and sexual elegists are immense, and yet although Kureishi is a past-master of the one-line put-down and the tart deflation, his ultimate aim, prolonged exposure to the dialogue insists, is not in the least satiric. When he observes of Henry that ‘he had always admitted that he’d been afraid to enjoy a full sexual life’ he seems to be playing it absolutely straight: Henry is the sort of person who turns up on Planet Kureishi; these are the kind of problems people like Henry have.

All this is fair enough, up to a point: just as rock musicians tend to compose in the keys of A, G and E, so Kureishi writes about rather pompous media types whose self-absorption is apparent to everyone but themselves. The drawback is that Henry, like practically everyone else on display here, is just deeply uninteresting to read about. Not everything in Something to Tell You is quite so spiritless. Significantly, when Kureishi springs Jamal and Miriam from his locus classicus and takes them off to early-Eighties Pakistan, the writing starts to fizz up in all kinds of unexpected ways; the political sub-text, too — Blair, Bush and July 2005 — is always lurking grimly on the novel’s margin. But large parts of this are simply navel-gazing.

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