More debit than credit

The people in Hanif Kureishi’s short fiction are rarely in the first flush of youth. Adam, the bleary sixtysomething protagonist of the title story, soon allows himself to be talked into experimenting with a new physical frame. Even at 45, Rick, the focus of ‘Remember This Moment, Remember Us’, is darkly conscious of having fetched up ‘on the wrong side of life’. To corporeal frailty can be added emotional mishap. Festooned with ex-partners, children seen at weekends, weighed down by complex domestic arrangements, the average Kureishi male can seem faintly dogged in his efforts to secure some private space amid the chaos of his fraught, middle-aged life.

There are two principal drawbacks to the kind of thing Kureishi writes now, a decade and more on from the South London panorama of The Buddha of Suburbia. One is his tendency to rely on the conceit. The title piece, for example, takes nearly 130 pages to arrive at the not particularly startling conclusion that inhabiting a new body and setting out in search of a mis-spent youth might not necessarily bring happiness in its trail. ‘Face to Face with You’, in which a youngish, flat-inhabiting couple are drawn into the orbit of a pair of doppelgangers who move into the upstairs apartment, strikes much the same note. Martin Amis, you feel, might have done something with these artificial juxtapositions: as worked out by Kureishi, the material has an odd, dutiful quality.

The second drawback is the extraordinary dreariness of most of the cast. Pattern 21st-century urban liberals to a man (and woman) usually occupying some minor coign of vantage on the London media world tenanted by their creator, they spend most of their time dealing with the consequences of their own self-absorption.