D J-Taylor

The return of Kureishi-man

D.J. Taylor reviews Hanif Kureishi's latest novel

issue 01 March 2008

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).

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