Anthony Powell always maintained that readers who disliked his early books did so on essentially non-literary grounds. Conservative reviewers of the 1930s, irked by the party-going degenerates of a novel like Afternoon Men (1931) did not believe that such people existed. If, on the other hand, they did exist then novels ought not to be written about them. The same danger has always lain in wait for Hanif Kureishi, whose fiction — whatever one might think of his prose style — has always been weighed down by the almost supernatural dreariness of the characters who wander about in it.
We first met Kureishi-man as long ago as The Buddha of Suburbia (1990). Older, by no means wiser and yet more inwardly distressed, he turned up again in Intimacy (1998), a novella whose subject was supposedly Kureishi’s own failed marriage, and the short stories collected in The Body (2002). Here in Something to Tell You, some even more extreme versions of him slouch over the clotted West London pavements: the wrong side of 50, but still clinging, barnacle-like, to the hull of SS Metropolitan Media, still obsessed with the sexual act and that lost Seventies past of drugs, women and radical politicking that no Kureishi-man has ever managed to subdue. If the current outing has a symbolic highpoint it comes when several members of the cast get to meet Mick Jagger in the aftermath of a Rolling Stones concert.
Jamal, Kureishi’s narrator, is a fashion- able psychoanalyst whose clientele includes a premiership footballer and, at any rate prospectively, Kate Moss. Festooned with grand literary friends, such as theatrical director Henry, his gaze also extends to crazy bohemia, here represented by his sister Miriam, by whom Henry is unexpectedly besotted and who accompanies her paramour to sex clubs convened beneath the Vauxhall viaducts. Jamal, meanwhile, is trying to make sense of a louche and dangerous adolescence, and in particular his relationship with Ajita, the love of his life, for whose abusive father’s death he was indirectly responsible. Nietzche is brought in to confirm that ‘The sexual passion is the heart of the will to live.’
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.