Like many of his books, Hanif Kureishi’s funny, irreverent Something to Tell You is less a story than the author leisurely discussing his thinly-fictionalized life. It’s immensely interesting as a chautauqua, though it doesn’t quite hang together as a novel. Kureishi deals with the problem of dialogue by punting entirely. The words placed in charactres’ mouths are impossibly literary in tone and bear little relation to the way real people talk, even erudite playwrights.

Kureishi’s London scene is artsy, racially integrated and sexually libertine. Everyone shags one another without regard for race, religion or sexual preference. British Asians are mouthy and horrible to their parents. Pakistan exists dimly as a holiday destination filled with rude and narrow-minded relatives who harsh the protagonist’s buzz:

Long before we got to Pakistan, like a lot of other ‘ethnics,’ [my sister had] been getting into the roots thing… To prepare for the trip, she’d joined a group of whirling dervishes in Notting Hill… Far from being ’spiritual,’ as Miriam understood it, Karachi was the most materialistic place we had been. I might have considered my father’s friends to be vulgar and shallow, but it was I who was made to feel shabby, like someone who’d missed a good opportunity in Britain…

‘What the fuck is this, a squat?’ … Father, an aristocrat to those he left behind, was living in a crumbling flat, the walls peeling, the wires exposed, the busted furniture seeming to have been distributed at random… [At Uncle Yasir's place] there was a rabid dog on the roof… The servants got a few good cracks in, and the dog lay injured… making god-awful noises… ‘You like our country?’…

It was a house of doe-eyed beauties… it occurred to me that this quartet of dark-skinned, long-haired women… Uncle Yasir’s daughters, might help me bear my pain.

Kureishi gestures languidly in the direction of suspense by progressively disclosing his protagonist’s crime, an accidental murder. The way Jamal’s victims let him off the hook is not very credible. But the book’s stuffed with trenchant social critique and outrageous patter existing primarily to seal the author’s membership in the provocracy. Niceties like plot and characters are not why you’d read this book. It’s beignets such as these:

They had requested a cupboard they could lock, where they kept scarves, whips, other clothes, amyl nitrate, vibrators, videos, condoms, and two metal tea infusers. I wondered whether these last two were being used as nipple clamps, or did Henry and Miriam enjoy a cup of orange pekoe when they finished?

and

I had been expounding the idea that Indian restaurants (rarely owned by Indians but by Bangladeshis) reproduced the colonial experience for the British masses… [Henry] didn’t want to be a colonialist when it came to his supper… The owners were not the white British, of course, but the Bangladeshis, from the world’s poorest country.

Kureishi is alternately incisive, filthy and falsely glib, a raconteur of rank. Something is full of frisky bullshit laced with occasional serious insight and ever-present wit. I wouldn’t leave him alone with a sister, but I’d read his books any day. Highly recommended.

Update: By popular demand.

Previously: Kureishi and curiouser, Something to Tell You, La maja desnuda, Toronto film fest preview, Unhappily ever after