A cuckold’s revenge

Perhaps the least necessary piece of advice ever given to a Hanif Kureishi protagonist comes in 2014’s The Last Word. ‘Harry,’ a wise old writer tells the main character, ‘always put your penis first.’

It’s a suggestion, needless to say, that Harry has no trouble accepting — not least because, like so many Kureishi protagonists, he shares the belief that ‘the body of the young woman is the world’s most significant object’. (Or as the narrator of 1998’s Intimacy puts it, ‘women’s bodies… are at the centre of everything worth living for’.)

Admittedly, Kureishi’s men do occasionally agonise between betraying their partners and betraying themselves — i.e. by failing to sleep with someone they fancy. But not, on the whole, for long. (After all, as the narrator of Intimacy also puts it, ‘There are some fucks for which a person would have their partner and children drown in a freezing sea.’)

By now, in fact, there’s a strong case to be made for Kureishi as the last of the great penis-prioritisers. Although a generation younger than the likes of Roth, Updike and Kundera, he’s no less committed to their ideal of endless sexual fulfilment as the key to a male life well lived.

All of which makes the premise of his new book rather intriguing. The narrator Waldo is a distinguished film director, who once lived in ‘a commune in California with the motorbike and live-in lesbians, sharing the love. Those magical fucks…’ Then after ‘numerous wives, lovers, matches and mismatches’ he met Zee, a Pakistani woman 22 years his junior. ‘With her,’ he tells us proudly, ‘it was the first time I wanted to be married to the person I was married to… She liked me to sit on her face, even until she couldn’t breathe.’