NEW YORK -- "I turned 50 and realized I'd been around for ages." That's Hanif Kureishi, novelist and screenwriter ("My Beautiful Laundrette," "Venus"), talking about the panorama of his latest book, "Something to Tell You."
"I could remember the '60s, and indeed the '50s, as well as the '70s and '80s . . .," Kureishi tells me during a conversation in the offices of his publisher, Scribner. "So I wanted to do something a bit bigger. You meet these people when you're 20 and somehow, when you're 53, you still know them. You can see their lives."
Carnal and carnivalesque, "Something to Tell You" departs from the compacted form of Kureishi's recent work like "Gabriel's Gift," "The Body" and "Intimacy" and harks back to the multi-character comedy of his first novels, 1990's "The Buddha of Suburbia" and 1995's "The Black Album."
Like the narrators of those books, Jamal, the middle-aged shrink who presides over "Something," finds himself amid all sorts of unlikely collections as he navigates London's racial, sexual and class barriers. Jamal's sister, Miriam, makes a living dealing in smuggled electronic equipment and maintains a profile as a fixture on daytime talk shows as the embodiment of whatever social problem or neurosis she can represent. In short order, she becomes the lover of Jamal's friend Henry, a theater and opera director, and the two are heading off to nights at London's swing clubs. The brother of Jamal's lost teenage love turns up as an acclaimed gay pop star whom Jamal meets at a Rolling Stones concert and Jamal is soon admitted into the presence of their doddering majesties.
When I tell Kureishi that he has always seemed to me the inheritor of the kaleidoscopic celebration of London that Colin MacInnes perfected in "Absolute Beginners," he says, "I like a book where [you get] . . . a sense of the whole sweep of society, the whole fabric. You can go from the lowest to the highest. Take a burglar or a dealer and then the dealer is dealing to a lord in the House of Lords. Dickens would've known everyone in London."
As always with Kureishi's work, it's impossible to say whether London is in a state of vitality or decline.
"[E]very place is becoming London now," says Jamal at one point, "the city stain spreading." He goes on to this description of the working-class suburb of Middlesex, "recently voted Britain's least popular county":
