I have to say that I like Hanif Kureishi's coming-of-age stories (My Beautiful Laundrette, The Black Album, Buddha of the Suburbs, London Kills Me) more than his coming of depression and dissolution stories of middle age (in Love in a Blue Timeand Midnight All Day). Although he has not lost his sense of the absurd, he seems to have lost his confidence in the pleasures of sex and pop culture. Not that he shows any signs of going the way of "My son, the fanatic" or of reversing the choice Shahid Hasan eventually made (for secular hedonism against puritanical Islam) in The Black Album.

The leitmotif of his recent work (his short novel Intimacy has been packaged with this story collection in an American edition of this story collection, though it was issued separately before and is in the U.K.) is the determination to break off an earlier relationship despite some anguish about the trauma the break-up will visit on the children. At the beginning of Intimacy, the narrator named Jay (notoriously) says, "It is the saddest night, for I am leaving and not coming back.... I perch on the edge of the bath and watch my sons, aged 5 and 3,...Tomorrow I will do something that will damage and scar them."

Most of the male protagonists in the stories collected in Midnight All Day have ended relationships in ways leaving their female former partners bitter. The wife who has kept the house and changed the locks in "The umbrella" refuses to lend Roger an umbrella when he brings the boys (aged 4 and 5) back. In "Morning in the Bowl of Night" Alan, sitting in a pub, reflects on the relationship he knows will soon end: "Their arguments were bitter and their reconciliations no longer sweet," and knows that "love could be torn down in a minute, like taking a stick to a spider's web." A bit of bondage administered by an ex-girlfriend seems to provide both of them some catharsis in "That Was Then," and in the longest and most interesting (though not the most smoothly crafted) story in the collection, "Strangers When We Meet," the long-abandoned mistress gets some closure and increasing self-actualization (to the distress of her husband, who has long been successful in business).

The first two-thirds of "Strangers When We Meet" is a wistful rendering of a classical farce in which Rob and his mistress, Florence, go on a much-anticipated vacation to be together. However, her husband Archie decided to go along. Archie plays with Rob like one of the bullies in Pinter's plays. His longed-for comeuppance still has not come at the end of the story, but is visible on the horizon. The dialogue in "A Meeting, At Last" also strikes me as Pinteresque, and that story also concludes with the likelihood of a breakup visible on the horizon.

Relationships survive in several of the stories-- in "Four Blue Chairs" the relationship survives the trauma of getting the furniture to the flat and in "Girl" the relationship survives not only considerable incompatibility but a particularly frightening nihilistic mother-in-law. Paternity is reluctantly accepted in the title story (and, perhaps, in "A Meeting, At Last").

One story, "Sucking Stones," is almost entirely about the (nonsexual, indeed, unerotic) relationship between two women: Marcia, a teacher who aspires to be a writer, and a critically and commercially successful novelist, Aurelia Broughton. Marcia seizes some encouragement from Aurelia's interest, though it is obvious to the reader that Aurelia is interested in Marcia as a source of material rather than as a promising fledgling writer.

As in Kureishi's earlier collection, many of the characters are writers of various sorts or actors and directors. Their successes do not seem to have provided them much nourishment. Aurelia is unusual in being happy with her work and in doing her work, though her flaunting of commercial success (film adaptations, etc.) makes even her self-satisfaction suspect. I think that to Kureishi, she's just another minor celebrity (as he himself is in England). Marcie longs to be a successful writer more than she feels the need to write to express or communicate anything. In "That was then," it seems at the end that Nick is going to get down to writing after a period of sterility, and Florence has returned to what might a vocation (as an actress) at the end of "Strangers When We Met," but it is hard not to wonder whether Kureishi himself finds writing fulfilling or clean-hands culture work that affords him some public recognition.

Kureishi is very good at the London-at-the-turn-of-the-(Christian) millennium bittersweet comedy of male menopause and the attendant breakup of marriages (common-law and contracted ones) and at expressing the sort of narcissistic anguish ("Is that all? It can't be!") of which John Cheever used to be the suburban American master.+ I know that it is not for me to prescribe what he should write about, but I think that (1) if he is going to work through or rationalize his own abandonment of his former partner and their children by writing, he should be done by now, and (2) he has considerable insight into the competing lures of Western pop culture and of "Eastern" religions(*) for (particularly) those of Muslim descent living (and frequently born) in the West (My Son, the Fanatic, The Black Album, Buddha of the Suburbs) and of the competing cultural pressures on South Asians living in England (My Beautiful Laundrette, Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, London Kills Me, plus the previously listed three). It is not for me to say he should write about those from his (Muslim Pakistani) father's side rather than about WASPs (his mother's side). Perhaps he feels he has nothing to add to what he has written about the former. However, I don't think he has much to add to the subject of middle-aged WASP infidelity.

Despite the narrow range of subject matter in the stories in Midnight All Day and their gray London monochrome, Kureishi remains a master of dialogue. "The Umbrella" and "Four Blue Chairs" are masterpieces in the Chekhov tradition. The longer, bumpier "Strangers When We Met," "That Was Then," and "Sucking Stones" are very interesting, indulge less in male self-pity, and have interesting non-victim female characters.

NOTES

+ E.g., this from Intimacy: "Why do people who are good at families have to be smug and assume it is the only way to live, as if everybody else is inadequate? Why can't they be blamed for being bad at promiscuity?" Or "I think I have become the adults in The Catcher in the Rye."

(*) I am very well aware that in imperial Rome, Christianity was considered one of those mystic Eastern religions, and that Christianity and Islam began not very far apart.

(BTW, both of Kureishi's short-story collections have a variant of Kafka's "Metamorphosis." The one here, "The Penis," is a considerable improvement on "The Flies" from Love in a Blue Time, but such fables are not the forte of this K.)



Recommended: Yes