Something to Tell You by Hanif Kureishi. ISBN 978-0-571-23876-7
The principal protagonist, Jamal, is a psychoanalyst. One of his patients masturbates over his mother’s prosthetic limb, another has a phobia about water, another loved to ‘shit himself in public’, and yet another was a woman who stuck needles into her breasts and thighs ‘until she bled and orgasmed’. A further patient covered his penis with insects and ‘said he wanted literally to fuck my brain’ (page 385). Despite these excesses, none of his patients is well-drawn or credible. Most of them are significantly weirder than the patients that psychotherapists do see in private practice – they are exaggerations.
Thus the ageing male psychoanalyst at the centre of this story is not particularly plausible. Missing from his musings is any analysis of the emotional impact on his life of what these people tell him – their projected emotions (or transference) taking hold and creating consequences, reverberations, which then must be analysed; such musings are at the heart of the therapeutic alliance and are curiously absent from a book about disclosure, or the absence of it.
The patients wash off the psychoanalyst like water off a duck’s back, though Kureishi is sometimes eloquent about mental distress, which he does not romanticise, seeing it as primarily debilitating and limiting.
In some senses, Kureishi is attempting to be a modern Dickens, with larger-than-life characters and situations, but unlike Dickens, who was a social reformer, with a conscience and a moral imperative at play in his depictions of the horror of the workhouse, the grinding poverty of the working classes, or child cruelty, Kureishi seems to be entirely morally impoverished.
One of the extraordinary things about this large book is that none of the female characters are interesting. Josephine, his estranged wife doesn’t read much, we are told. Fundamentally, she’s not very bright or interesting, and exists in the text to permit Jamal to have a relationship with their son Rafi, and to explore his feelings of guilt. Jamal though, is mainly gung-ho - “may you have many wives,” he says to his son at one point, as though women are disposable. The son insults his mother with sexist and degrading remarks and Jamal, though asked by Josephine for help in addressing this problem, does not raise it with his son.
Josephine does resurface towards the end of the book – implausibly, in a fetish club, where he watches her being fucked by other men and thinks about ‘fucking’ her himself without revealing his identity. She lies passive, the smell of other men on her, and thus she is the object of the author’s sexual fantasies. Later, when they converse, she is interested in his work and his ideas, and no personality of her own emerges.
His ‘uneducated’ sister is a bit of a basket case. She, we are told, has low self-esteem, tattoos and body piercings. She lives in a council house with her children by several different men and is depicted as a freak, (though healed by her kinky and loving relationship with Jamal’s best friend, Henry, and becomes happy). Primarily, Miriam is a device, rather than a flesh-and-blood character, which gives Kureishi entry into a different, working-class domain in the book. But readers don’t get to know Miriam.
The most interesting section of the book is when Kureishi reflects on a brief sojourn in Pakistan. Miriam and Jamal are sent by their mother to get to know their father, who had returned to live there. The father from Bombay is alienated by how Pakistan is developing and by the increasing influence of the mullahs. He is no more at home there than he had been in England.
Miriam is sent to be with the women folk while Jamal gets to spend time with his father. Miriam won’t wear a headscarf and is spat at when she goes out. It is her promiscuity which has them thrown out of their family group, and this glimpse of a feisty Western woman not prepared to compromise her values is the closest we come to finding Miriam as a person.
There is also Jamal’s ex-girlfriend, Karen, who is quite explicitly described as a media whore who has sex with her male bosses for promotion, and whose lack of intellect, and production of low-grade popular culture, he despises.
His mother realises herself through spending money, and we never learn about her either. Henry’s wife is disliked by Jamal, but she is allowed to develop some personality.
Ajita, another of his lovers, is mainly mysterious. We don’t know her, though we would like to know her better. She becomes the object of the author’s masochistic fantasy when she develops a relationship with a man who beats her and she is said to enjoy this!
The other women described appear in fetish clubs, are strippers or whores who have no interior life at all. They, we are led to suppose, enjoy what they do. There are no children trafficked here against their will in Kureish’s male fantasies. Oh, and there’s Henry’s daughter, who is in distress and who Jamal agrees to help. After their little chat, she sucks him off.
The extraordinary misogyny permeating this text is irksome – “Marry someone you hate and then give them your house” is Jamal’s favourite joke! Seeing whores is just something a man does. There is no introspection. There is no exploitation. The misogyny is often eloquent. Jamal, complaining about his maintenance payments to Josephine, says, ‘I had given Josephine my stake in the house, but she constantly requested more money. These days reparation for the crime of leaving your lover was limitless. Money had become a substitute for love’ (page 383). These little gems of insight and articulacy are too few to warrant the trudge though this squalid book.
This is a self-indulgent novel which has left me feeling polluted by the author’s depraved sexual fantasies and palpable hatred of women.
Susan Hogan is Professor of Cultural Studies.
