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. Naturally, tiresome people have their private epiphanies and tragedies like anybody else, but the rhythms of distress tapped out by these fortysomething coke-sniffers, tail-chasers and ex-spouse appeasers occasionally lapse into the kind of portentousness that marred Intimacy, Kureishi’s novella of four years back.
On the credit side, Kureishi writes extremely well – as he always has done – about the relationship between parents and children. ‘The Real Father’, for instance, is a notably sharp account of a film editor taking the irritating product of a brief ten- year-old encounter on a seaside trip that includes a job interview. ‘Touched’, set in the 1960s, finds Kureishi back in the familiar territory of a teenage boy observing, and to a certain extent participating in, the tensions brought by the arrival of his holidaying Indian relatives.
Best of all, perhaps, is ‘Remember This Moment, Remember Us’. Most of the key Kureishi themes are here – mid-life neuroses, children, that fatigued metropolitan ambience – but given a poignant extra dimension. Having spent an alcoholic evening with two-year-old Daniel at a party given by a more successful friend, Rick, abetted by his wife Anna, decides to camcord a message from the two of them that Daniel can watch on his own 45th birthday. Suddenly a desperate sense of time passing, the genuine anxieties of people for whom the future is no longer a rosy blur, comes stealing up through the fog of white wine fumes and reefer smoke. Elsewhere, though, particularly in the title story, Kureishi’s method of dealing with these preoccupations has a slightly gimmicky air, and the sense of a writer becoming detached from the things that are worth writing about is rather too strong for comfort.
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