Interview

High Infidelity: An Interview with Hanif Kureishi

by Sylvia Brownrigg

The Hanif Kureishi who welcomes me into his comfortable, spacious West London rowhouse is neither wary nor smug, nor monstrously arrogant; in fact, the slight, serious figure bears almost no resemblance to the British media's bad-boy caricature of him. Polite, open, engaged, the 45-year-old writer talks to me in a winter-lit, book-crowded room about the typically broad spread of his recent work: his new play, Sleep With Me; his latest film,My Son the Fanatic, which opens stateside in June; and his controversial novel Intimacy(Scribner, 118 pp., $16), a bestseller in Britain, where it was hailed by some as Kureishi's best book so far and lambasted by others for its exposure of raw family wounds.

Intimacy is a short, blunt shock of a novel— stark, compelling, and painfully affecting. Set over one night, "the saddest night," it is the story of restless, disgruntled scriptwriter Jay, who has decided to walk out on his partner Susan and their two sons. The leaving is cluttered, as leavings often are, with contradictions and ambivalences. Jay is a man "lost in the middle of my life and no way home": drawn to his beautiful young girlfriend Nina; stubbornly committed to ending his relationship with Susan (unbeknownst to her); and devoted to his sons, whose "affectionate words and little voices are God's breath to me." Condensing Jay's doubts and frustrations into a single night's tortuous reflections gave the story a heightened focus, allowing Kureishi to create, as he describes it, "an emotional thriller." "Obviously that isn't something that happened to me; it probably hasn't happened to anybody, but the form of that excited me very much."

Kureishi might not have lived the particular arc of that crafted night, but he did leave his partner and sons for a younger girlfriend. His ex-partner (and former editor) has spoken bitterly to the press about the double betrayal, and even his sister joined the fray, sending a harangue about her brother's distortions and exaggerations to a London newspaper that had published a profile of him. Kureishi claims he would never write a character "out of revenge," but his outraged ex-partner seems to see it differently. If "hurting someone is an act of reluctant intimacy," as Jay says in the novel's early pages, then publishing Intimacyappears to be— to put it charitably— an act of reluctant hurting. But Kureishi's skin is apparently toughened to this criticism. "I've been around a long time, so I'm kind of used to it." He laughs briefly about the proximity of attack in this case— "a member of your own family!"— but comes back, implacably, to the mantralike lines, "You have to write what you want to write." And: "Other people have to take care of themselves."

Such lines are probably a necessary protection for a writer who has always been interested in challenging orthodoxies, from his first great success in 1985, My Beautiful Laundrette, which drew protests for its depiction of an interracial gay relationship, to last year's My Son the Fanatic, a father-son drama about the dangers of fundamentalism, set in Bradford, England, where much of the worst Rushdie book-burning took place. But beneath the sales-generating headlines about family feuds there is a novel. Kureishi's commitment as a novelist animates our conversation, first as he explains his resistance to Hollywood offers afterLaundrette, saying that he had no desire to do work that didn't interest him just for money— that would have been too like his father, who was a clerk and frustrated novelist. Later, when I mention Catherine Texier's memoirBreakup, to which Intimacy is a fictional, masculine counterpart, Kureishi makes a case for the novel over the memoir. "It seems to me that the way to get to the truth is to write fiction. People have forgotten that."

The truths Kureishi dispenses here are, indisputably, ugly ones. "I wanted to give a picture of how out of control you can be in a situation, and how nasty the whole thing is. I didn't want to make the people nicer." He doesn't. Susan remains a cipher, sketched only in the shades of Jay's dislike for her "fat, red weeping face" in the counselor's room; his sour line that "she thinks she's a feminist but she's just bad-tempered." Jay, however, is presented to us in a brutal technicolor of selfish hostility. In one gruesomely comic scene, Jay masturbates into Susan's underwear in the bathroom while thinking of Nina. It is an unflinching portrait of a man contorted by his dislike for an obviously blameless woman. "When we fall in love, clearly it's an illusion, it's an intoxication," Kureishi says, "but hatred too is an illusion and an intoxication." He thought at one point of calling the novel Animosity, so rife was the book with it, but finally opted for the safer irony of Intimacy.

Is the book misogynist? It may seem so, if Jay's specific animosity is read as a general animus against women. But Kureishi says that only male critics have read it that way. And while it's reassuring to read about the nice, Nick Hornby guys who come round in the end, there is something recognizable, for men and also for women, in the cold, paradoxical desires of the leaver: the simultaneous longing for peace and for intensity, the hope for the future and the abandoning of the past. "Are you an optimistic man because you ran away or are you a coward because you ran away? Who would decide?" These are, as Kureishi says, some of the questions dogging the men of his generation.

They are also haunted by questions about fatherhood. At one point Jay asks himself, "Where have all the fathers gone? Where are they hiding and what are they doing?" There is a poignancy, if you're in the mood to catch it, in this description of a man watching himself, baffled, become a father who leaves. And Kureishi, sitting in the house he now shares with his girlfriend and their infant son, reflects on that loss in his own life. "I don't live with my oldest children, but I find that very painful, every day. It's heartbreaking to me."

In many of his fictions, the relationship between father and son is the defining bond: it is the fire that lights My Son the Fanatic; it will occupy much of the new novel he is working on; and it is one of the few sources of sweetness in the otherwise bitter Intimacy. At one point Jay, who never did marry Susan, reflects of his father, "He, more than anyone, was the person I wanted to marry."

Kureishi's father would not, he thinks, have liked this book. As an immigrant, "he didn't like leaving, and he didn't like anybody who left." But Kureishi hasn't let that affect his actions, or his work. His goal is to chronicle the quandaries of his own generation of men, and with this book he seems to have struck a chord. Toward the end of the saddest night, as he decides to leave, Jay says, "I had to make my contribution to the broken side of things." Intimacy is the art Kureishi's made of that contribution.