Something To Tell You By Hanif Kureishi
Posted at 10:53AM Tuesday 30 Dec 2008
Something to Tell You
ISBN: 9780571238767
A psychoanalyst in his 50s is the hero, and middle age is its subject. Inevitably, there is much looking back, to 1960s protests and 1970s squats, as Jamal Khan moves from idleness to professional success and minor celebrity, gains and loses a wife and looks on in horror as his son enters his teenage years. The resulting long and winding soap opera is full of name drops, intellectuals and low-lifes. The book's drama centres on Jamal's first love, and the death that resulted from it. The key players inch their way back into his life, just as his friend Henry is rejecting dotage for a lifestyle of drug use and fetish clubs. It's easy to be annoyed by these self-important characters and their author's sporadically lazy prose, but there's more than enough incident and insight to keep things interesting. At the book's heart pulses a restless hunger for experience, and whether Kureishi is writing informal love letters to west London, musing on race and class or slipping through the door of strip joints, he manages to make it all sound rather vital.
Guardian review
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