You'd be in therapy too
Hanif
Kureishi has been on the literary scene for about twenty years,
but I’ve never felt the urge to read one of his books. Maybe
it’s because no one loves a renaissance man: novels, plays,
screenwriting, memoirs - make your mind up, will you? But his
new novel Something to Tell You has already had some
good advance word in the papers - hype, you say? - so I couldn’t
resist when the opportunity arose.
The cover shows a multitude of couples in various
entwinements (but nothing troubling: and I did look), which pretty
well sums up the book. Kureishi courted controversy with his novella
Intimacy, which some claimed was a self-serving account of his
failed marriage; Something to Tell You makes its narrator,
Jamal Khan, a psychotherapist (”an autobiographer’s
assistant, midwife to my patients’ fantasies”), so
the relationships, failed at worst and at best straining, fill
the pages to bursting. As to whether there is more author than
character in observations like “The founding myth of heterosexuality:
completion, the ultimate fulfilment,” I will not speculate
(although in saying so, I kind of have).
Jamal - I find myself thinking of him in first name
terms - was a youth in the sixties, and still acts that way, even
though now the only sixties he’s proximate to are his own.
Even now, separated from his wife and on occasional terms with
his son, he’s not averse to a little light prostitution:
Then she secured me to the bed with handcuffs.
In a corner of the room was a cross to which you could also
be tied, but I preferred the bed. I was keen to try most perversions,
provided you could sit down for them.
Even then, his libido cannot quite subdue his inner
analyst:
I felt as mystified as ever about the multiplicity
and importance of human desire, and of how destructive and fulfilling
it could be, with, often, the destructiveness sponsoring the
achievement.
This is a central issue for the book, along with
that of “[responsibility] for our selves. But what are our
selves? Where do they begin and how far do they extend?”
Responsibility for themselves often seems to be the last thing
on the minds of Jamal and his contemporaries, though destructive
desire is pretty high up the agenda. Many, indeed, will find their
middle-class London-centric self-indulgence maddening, and Kureishi
acknowledges this too:
Most nights his crowd went to drinks parties
and then to dinner. It was expensive: the clothes, food, drugs,
drink, taxis. Not that money was an issue for them. ‘But
it’s like an Evelyn Waugh novel!’ Lisa said, going
to some trouble never to see any of them again. ‘He’s
one of my favourite writers,’ Henry replied.
Henry is one of the grandest characters in the book,
a theatre director with a gourmand’s appetite for everything,
who “carried his own atmosphere with him” and has
a splendid line in self-involved speeches (”I don’t
want to be loved. I want to be desired. Love is safety, but desire
is foul. ‘Give me excess of it…’”). He
is in love with Jamal’s sister, Miriam. This is the least
in a circuit of relationships past and present which haunt Jamal
first- and second-hand. He is still in love with his first girlfriend
Ajita. He can’t quite divorce his wife, and his son often
hates him. Oh, and did he tell you he was once involved in a murder?
Guilt gets a look-in too. Therapist: heal thyself.
The murder story, and its long-term consequences,
keeps the plot going at otherwise quiet moments - though there
is little quiet in this teeming novel of lifelike messiness -
and one of the incidental pleasures are the asides into the history
and practice of psychotherapy. As well as this, Something
to Tell You acts as a scattergun social history of Britain
in the last forty years, touching on race relations, celebrity
culture (”That was how, until recently, we examined the
Other, through the imagination and intelligence of an artist like
Ibsen or Proust. Now everyone revealed everything but no one understood
anything”) and (as inevitably as American novels ‘dealing
with’ September 11) the London Tube bombings of July 2005.
The structure of the book seems shapeless, but in
fact is better described as roomy, giving space for Kureishi to
try to fit everything in - even if some of the elements stick
out obtrusively as a result, and there are sags and gaps here
and there. Any sufficiently messy performance has a charm of its
own, particularly when so many of the players are so consumed
with themselves. Jamal identifies two of them as “madmen
… their craziness not making an increase of life but, rather,
consternation, despair, isolation.” He should take a look
at himself.
John Self
To read more of John Self's book reviews, check
out his blog at
The Asylum.
