Article 4: My Dirty Laundrette
By ERICA WAGNER
Published: August 22, 2008
How startling to realize that it’s nearly a quarter-century since “My
Beautiful Laundrette” — the film that kicked off Hanif Kureishi’s literary career with such daring
and panache — brilliantly toyed with our perceptions of Thatcherite
But
in later years, as Kureishi has turned toward the form of the novel, a certain staleness has crept in. His new novel, “Something
to Tell You,” is set in Kureishi’s home turf of West London — but a
It
is, in fact, about Jamal, a middle-aged man of Pakistani-English heritage who
has built himself a successful career as a psychoanalyst, though he is dogged
by all the afflictions that burden middle-aged men in novels: divorce,
alienation from his kid (Rafi, who’s 12 and lives
with his mother, the languid Josephine) and an interest in kinky sex. (Bet you
couldn’t see that one coming, eh?) His life is loosely divided between seeing
patients — which doesn’t really seem to take up much of his attention and may,
indeed, be merely an excuse for the author to drop the names of Freud, Lacanand R. D. Laing — and schmoozing with a wilfully
diverse and yet never quite diverting cast of characters.
These
include his sister, Miriam, a pierced and tattooed single mother of five, and
his best friend, Henry, a film and theater director.
These two, as it happens, form a relationship of the kind that’s best described
as “unlikely,” based on Miriam’s introducing Henry to (here we go again) the
pleasures of kinky sex clubs. The thing about unlikely relationships in books,
though, is that they’re meant, eventually, to become likely: this one never
does, because Henry and Miriam never become three-dimensional. This is not
surprising, given the lines Kureishi gives them to speak. Why does Henry become
enamored of Miriam’s wild ways? Because
“sex is mad, mad, mad, Jamal.” You don’t say!
If
the novel’s plot could be said to have an engine, it’s that chestnut, the Past
Returning to Haunt Him. Jamal’s past reappears in the of-course-still-lovely
form of Ajita, long-lost love of his young manhood,
who vanished the night after he and two friends didn’t (after all, exactly, not
really) kill her father, after Ajita had revealed to
Jamal that her father was raping her night after night. One of the friends, who
also reappears in order to blackmail the theoretically
respectable Jamal, happens to be named Wolf, allowing Kureishi to jest that his
narrator “hadn’t succeeded in keeping the Wolf from the door.”
That’s
the kind of writing that drags this novel down. Here is Kureishi, letting his
creative juices flow over the Rolling Stones, who make a cameo appearance: “Although they
had been doing those tunes for 30 years, the Stones didn’t make their boredom
obvious; they knew how to put on a good show, particularly Keef.”
(Kureishi, one may discover, had the good fortune to see the Stones himself
and, indeed, have a drink with Mick at Claridge’s
Hotel in
“Make
it new” is an old saw, but one that bears repeating. This is, finally, a dismal
novel; its author’s apparent lack of imagination makes it hard for the reader
to believe any ironic distance exists between himself and the narrator when he
has Jamal reassure his ex-wife, who’s worried she hasn’t made her way in the
world, by saying: “No man considered a woman to be more of a woman because she
was successful. For some reason, that criterion applied only to men.” Henry’s
crazy-feminist daughter Lisa reads “Plath, Sexton, Olds, Rich” but is partially
redeemed when Jamal permits her to give him oral sex. All of this would be fine
if any of it were believable: but it isn’t, so it’s not. If you are looking for
a vibrant portrait of modern
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/k/hanif_kureishi/index.html
Academic year 2008/2009
© a.r.e.a./Dr.Vicente Forés López
© Emma Corbín García
emcorgar @alumni.uv.es
Universitat de València Press