Stephen_Murray's Full Review: Hanif Kureishi - Gabriel's Gift: A Novel
Recently, I have been disappointed by some of may favorite authors (Michael Chabon's Summerland, Michael Cunningham's Land's End, and especially Paul Auster's Timbuktu), so I was especially pleased that another of them came through. Writing well isn't enough, although it certainly helps. Hanif Kureishi has good eyes and ears for absurdities and for the perils of postmodern London. From the screenplay for "My Beautiful Laundrette" through his fourth novel, Gabriel's Gift, he has brought to life a range of characters, some of whom do bad things (such as leave the young children in Intimacy), many of whom do stupid things, but none of whom are pilloried. He writes about the shortcomings of his characters with a compassion that is uncommon among male authors (though I'd say Chabon and Cunningham share this, the epitome is the late, great Penelope Fitzgerald).
Coeditor of the Faber Book of Pop Kureishi also has a long-standing interest in popular culture in general, and rock music in particular. A number of his short stories and The Black Album deal with pop stars, would-be- pop stars, and the businessmen who make their living from pop phenomena. The fifteen-year-old Gabriel of the title is a fledgling visual artist who wants to make movies. His father, Rex, played guitar, bass, and more in a glitter-rock band featuring a David Bowie-like singer, Lester Jones, in the early 1970s before an on-stage fall in high platform-heeled shoes required his replacement.
Rex has been living off his wife until she sent him packing a few months before the beginning of the novel. She has hired (for room and board--a lot of board) a housekeepr/nannry named Hannah, who Gabriel does not want to be seen with or supervised by. His father is living in a greasy room on the fifth floor of a tenement. Or, rather, he is sleeping there, and living in a pub. At the pub he gets a call from Lester who is trying to write a memoir, though he remembers very little.
Rex and Gabriel are whisked past groupies staking out the hotel where Lester is staying. After some desultory talk about the drug-enshrouded past with Rex, Lester becomes interested in Gabriel, who has been drawing him. Lester talks seriously to Gabriel about art and his own making of text-heavy visual art. He finishes and gives Gabriel a piece he has been working on. This is the literal "Gabriel's gift," though the title also indicates Gabriel's artistic talent, which brings some objects he draws or paints off the page. And there is a third gift, his telepathic communication with a twin brother who died years before.
Both parents regard Lester's signed piece as a source of money. Gabriel steals it from his mother's safekeeping and makes two copies, one of which his father sells and the other of which his mother very nearly sells to the same person. Gabriel gets the buyer, Speedy, a gay club owner with a reputation for being rapacious in business and in sex, to trade the (counterfeit) Lester Jones for a portrait of himself by Gabriel.
Without laying out any more of the plot, it is obvious that the plot is complicated. Through Speedy, Rex stumbles upon his vocation, and Gabriel's Mum (she must have a name, but it isn't used very often, if at all) improves her lot . Both parents are taken aback that Gabriel has been alone with Speedy, but at least Mum quickly realizes that Gabriel does what he wants and would not do anything he didn't want to do.
Mother knows best, but she doesn't have a monopoly on insight. For instance, Rex acknowledes "how self-destructuve I am, but as with everything else, I'm not particularly good at it" (explaining how he survived).
Especially after Intimacy, which set off something of a scandal in Britain, -- and being set in London -- Gabriel's Gift is a remarkably sunny book. Intimacy centers on the destruction of a family (as does "My Son, the Fanatic" and "Sammie and Rosie Get Laid"). Gabriel's Gift portrays a family renucleating with no casualties. It is also a lovely portrait of how a little encouragement (Lester's of Gabriel foremost, but also Gabriel's of his Dad) can make a major difference to a young (and/or lost) artist. Maybe it's too good to be true, though I think there are more than a few children who have raised their parents and more than a few adolescents who have helped their parents grow up. Kureishi has recovered the deft comic touch of his first two novels and produced an optimistic (and WASP) variant of his poignant (and Pakistani-English) The Buddha of Suburbia. I don't have a clue where he will go next, but am eager to find out.
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