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Hanif Kureishi

The trajectory of this short novel is set on the first page: “It is the saddest night, for I am leaving and not coming back.”

After a ten-year relationship, he is leaving his partner and two young children. He wants to avoid a scene, and plans to leave in the morning, after his partner has gone to work and the children to playschool. So he lives through one last day with them all as a family, while he intermittently reflects back on how it has come to this.

There is no good justification for this slinking off, and the narrator Jay doesn’t try to make excuses. Far from it, he follows a path of honesty, albeit a twisting and turning path.

It’s very good, and Jay’s attempts to be honest, annoying as they may be, have the ring of authenticity. The beginning holds plenty of promise: the snappy prose builds up tension, we see his children playing innocently and his unsuspecting wife asking what ice cream to put on the shopping list. (It gives the wrong impression to keep calling her ‘partner’.) We get a feeling for how despicable an act it is he is planning. A crime for the sake of what?

But the story rarely soars. Often there is a feeling that Jay thinks he is shocking the reader with his sexual honesty. Someone should tell him ‘fuck’ has ceased to be provocative. And if Jay is a man driven and tormented by sexual desire, that desire fails to be conveyed. At one point he mentions his drug use, and mentions that he used to attend parent-teacher meetings under the influence of acid. Later in the book he confides he took cocaine for a week. “It is the secrecy I enjoy, and perhaps the challenge.” Perhaps he thinks the mere ritual of taking drugs makes him of a kind with the 60’s generation and bestows liberation on him. Jay doesn’t come across as a man whose life is more intense or passionate than other people’s. But assuredly he would like to think he is.
Perhaps it is the same with sex and relationships: he has a near-religious faith that exercising sexual freedom will make him a more authentic person.

We had a free, superior and somewhat lazy education. Then we went on the dole for five years in order to pursue our self-righteous politics, before starting work in the media and making a lot of money. We weren’t much restrained by morality or religion. Music, dancing and conscienceless fucking were our totems. We boasted that we were the freest there’d ever been.

In any such first-person story, where there is a lack of insight or imagination, it can be impossible to decide whether this is a failing of the real-world author, or a skilful presentation of the narrator’s failings. The book will speak to many, it is undoubtedly an authentic portrayal. It says something about the narrator’s generation, albeit a limited cohort of media types.

It was controversial when published because it taps into biographical events. I’m reading it solely as a novel

Knut Hamsun
Hunger

In the genealogy of fiction influences this novel is the missing link. In retrospect I could have inferred the existence of such a novel from the totality of other novels I have read. Its influence crops up everywhere, in outsider-type characters across several novels and in Kafka’s Hungerkunstler, in biographies, and even in my own stories.

The account begins “It was in those days when I wandered about hungry in Kristiania, that strange city which no one leaves before it has set its mark upon him….”

This young man with no purpose, no allegiances, no job, no worldly ambition wanders through the city. He has previously written a couple of articles for a newspaper and earned money for it. But now the money has run out and he cannot pay the rent. He leaves a note for his landlady, shuts the door behind him, and walks the streets. He gives no thought to the future – it is late evening before he begins to think of where he might sleep for the night. He is proud and honest. No family or close friends are mentioned, he never thinks of them, nor do we learn anything specific about his life up to that point. He is educated and has student friends, the editor treats him as a social equal. Yet he has no-one to appeal to in his abject state. He seems to lack a self-preservation instinct: there are surely options open to him, a loan from someone, family members however distant, his schoolteachers. It is easy to say “he is too proud to ask for help”. But pride is just a word, and as the reader sinks fully into the narrative the man’s moment-by-moment experience pushes aside any simple explanation of motives.

In the opening pages our nameless narrator gives some of his last money to a beggar, pawns his waistcoat, and spins a fantasy tale to the pawnbroker of how he is a famous philosopher. The pawnbroker gives no indication he disbelieves the story. The narrator goes on his wanders, making up prestigious identities to impress beggars and strangers on park benches. At one point he follows two young women – “stalks” them would be the modern word. His mood veers from elation to despair. The reader experiences a constant anxiety that this man will commit a random crime or some act that will end in his destruction.

He thinks about God:

God had struck his finger down into the network of my nerves and gently, quite casually, brought a little confusion among the threads …. And there was a gaping hole after his finger, which was God’s finger, and wounds in my brain from the track of his finger.

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