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.
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