Middle-age march

SEX DREAD Kureishi finds erotic transgressions half empty.

Photograph: Sarah Lee

Hanif Kureishi is best known in America for his carnivalesque, druggie, culture-bending novel Buddha of Suburbia (1990) and for writing My Beautiful Laundrette (1985), the seminal and taboo-flouting independent film. In his native London he’s also known as a public intellectual and provocateur, setting off days of culture editorials and heated blog debates with off-the-cuff remarks such as “Writing courses, particularly when they have the word creative in them, are the new mental hospitals, but the people are very nice.”

But the author’s truly controversial positions, found in his writing, are far subtler—and genuinely unnerving. His work is fascinated by domestic conflict and the mundanely unconventional: orgies, open marriage and labor politics in the film Sammy and Rose Get Laid; religion and interracial coupling in My Son the Fanatic; divorce and infidelity in what is perhaps his most reviled work, the short novel Intimacy. “I think of life as being a series of losses and separations,” the author, 53, tells TONY from his home in London. “All relationships change and end. That’s as inevitable as love itself, but harder to bear.”

Throughout his career, Kureishi has unflinchingly portrayed his characters’ missteps and upsets, screwups and milestones. Now, with his new, and easily his best, novel, Something to Tell You, he presents psychological drama through the eyes of a Freudian psychoanalyst. “Secrets are my currency,” says Jamal, the book’s narrator. But we soon learn that the doctor has his own dark places too, and that he requires healing as much as any of his patients.

Kureishi’s novel revisits the busy, drug- and sex-addled world of London’s cultural elite. Jamal—also a popular psychology writer—is recently divorced and living just around the corner from his ex-wife and preadolescent son. His best friend, an aging denizen of avant-garde theater, has just gotten involved in a passionate love affair with Jamal’s sister, Miriam. She is an overgrown rebel, a tattooed single mother of half a dozen children by as many different men, and she sells contraband jeans and marijuana out of the back of her “chauffeur’s” minivan.

A healthy portion of the novel takes place in sex clubs and brothels (in addition to rose gardens and well-appointed parlors). Kureishi, and most of his characters, came of age during the sexual revolution, and he’s constantly trying to work out where those so-called freedoms left his generation. “Now that there’s no repression, sex is consumeristic, repetitive, empty—it’s lost its impact,” he says. “There’s no transgression, so it gets mechanical.”

His predilection for explicit sex scenes recently led Time Out London to name him one of the city’s “most erotic writers.” But the author claims that titillation isn’t the point. “They should give me the ‘most neurotic writer’ award instead,” he quips. “I’m not trying to turn the reader on—I’m trying to write about character.”

Indeed, sex isn’t Jamal’s dilemma. Beset and bemused by his needy loved ones, he is consumed by another kind of guilt—the terribly hidden event that hurled him onto the path of analysis as a young man. His obsession with his past distracts him from more pressing concerns. “I am no longer young, and not yet old,” he comes to realize. “I have reached the age of wondering how I will live, and what I will do, with my remaining time and desire.”

This is where Something to Tell You startles. Beyond its jaunty, intelligent busyness, its leather masks and butt plugs, it is a book about loss, regret, self-knowledge, second chances and getting old. Like Buddha of Suburbia and each of Kureishi’s successive books and screenplays, the novel is in some significant way a twist on the traditional bildungsroman: The middle-aged come of age.

No matter what he says, Kureishi is the opposite of neurotic. He has a lizard-skinned, well-therapized self-confidence, and fearlessly leads his lovelorn characters into awkward and squirmy territory—as when the elderly matron of the 2003 film The Mother becomes sexually obsessed and physically involved with her daughter’s hunky lover, played by Daniel Craig. You can’t be timid or self-conscious if you’re portraying people’s vulnerabilities with such naked compassion.

“People want to be recognized and nurtured and listened to,” Kureishi says. But like his analyst narrator, the author also knows that human emotions spend a lot of time slithering wretchedly in the mud. His unflinching perspective causes many to look away, but it’s proof of his humanity and bigheartedness. Something to Tell You captures the conflict and shame that at some level we all share. Jamal has his personal demons, but he wrestles with the universal: “the secrets of why love is difficult, sex complicated, living painful, and death so close and yet placed far away.”

Something to Tell You (Scribner, $26) is out Tue 19.