Love In a Blue Time
212 pages, Scribner, New York, 1997.
Hanif Kureishi’s Love In a Blue Time is a mostly gloomy collection of short stories about love. In most of these grim tales, a bunch of self-absorbed 40-somethings search for the sexual excitement they enjoyed in earlier years. But gestures of spontaneous petting and sex with strangers are forced, uncomfortable, and ultimately unsatisfying. And there’s a woman back at the house waiting to share a life of drudgery.
The ‘60s, ‘70s, and even the ‘80s are over for Kureishi’s protagonists. It’s now the ‘90s in London, radicalism has descended to a marketable commodity, pure Marxism is a bore, bohemianism is a hustle, and even the Labour Party, the last resort for liberal chic, has become a clone of Clinton “liberalism.” In one story, In a Blue Time, Roy, a filmmaker who’s made a lot of cash but never graduated from commercials to features, invites a ne’er-do-well friend, Jimmy, to crash with him for a few days.
Jimmy is a charming loser who flees from responsibility, goes through relationships, abuses drugs, and makes a great first impression. We all know someone like that. Maybe some of us are like that. But Roy is unhappy with his “success.” He can’t get a feature made. Friends in college are pushing ahead of him, and he’s no longer in love with his pregnant wife, Clara. Jimmy may be high maintenance, but Roy recalls the recklessness they once enjoyed.
Their friendship had survived even the mid-eighties, that vital and churning period when everything had been forced forward with remorseless velocity. ... when Roy had a free day, Jimmy was the person Roy wanted to spend it with. The two of them would lurch from pub to pub from lunchtime until midnight, laughing at everything.
So, Jimmy crashes a few days with Roy and Clara, and manages to bullshit Roy’s financier into a screenplay contract and while drunk, convinces the man hat Roy is on the verge of a breakdown. So, Roy loses (again) financing for a film.
Not much happens after that; Jimmy returns to the streets (the screenplay will never be written of course) and Roy resumes life with Clara and his commercials.
Most of the stories in Love In a Blue Time end like this. Change is impossible -- things stay the same; A theme seems to be that we can’t change after middle age. In The Tale of the Turd, a 40sh-something man, unemployed and irresponsible, goes to dinner with the family of his 18-year-old girlfriend. Forced from the table to take a crap, he discovers the turd in the toilet bowl has teeth and refuses to be flushed. This strange story ends with the man, presumably on a bad drug trip, trying to fling the turd outside the window, while family members bang on the door..
The best of the aging lover tales is Nightlife, which deals with loneliness. The narrator, divorced, engages in a wordless affair with a woman. Their only language is sex, but the story conveys how important human touch is to all of us. Sex is not an urge, or a pleasure, says Kureishi. It’s nourishment, reassurance, and without it we hunger and eventually starve.
All his life, it seems, he has been seeking sex. He isn’t certain why, but he must have gathered that it was an important thing to want... As long as there is desire there is a pulse; you are alive; to want is to reach beyond yourself, into the world, finger by finger.
Kureishi’s stories of sour love are well written, but sterile (perhaps intentionally?). It’s difficult to connect Love In a Blue Time with the Hanif Kureishi who wrote the funny, insightful, coming-of-age novel, The Buddha of Suburbia, or the on-target attack on political correctness and sour radicalism, The Black Album.
But not all of the stories in Love In a Blue Time involve sexually frustrated men. The best, With Your Tongue Down My Throat, tells the story of two half sisters from different cultures who meet on their own turfs; one in India, the other in the London slums. Nina, from London, is a veteran of drug wars, prostitution and abortion. She leads her Indian sister Nadia through a tour of the London counter-culture. Nadia returns the favor and Nina visits India and the father that abandoned her. It’s a witty, fast-paced tale with a surprise at the end, and most closely resembles the first-person narrative style Kureishi employs in The Buddha of Suburbia.
Two other tales, We’re not Jews, and My Son the Fanatic, deal with parents trying to protect sons from the evils of the world. In the first, an English mother and her half-Indian son endure extreme racial cruelty on a bus. In the latter, a father horrified by his son’s descent into Islamic fundamentalism, eventually, in frustration, beats his son to a pulp. Through split lips, the boy asks, “So, who’s the fanatic now?”
Love in a Blue Time features a talented writer offering up downer love tales. If it’s not your bag, try Kureishi’s Buddha of Suburbia. You won’tbe disappointed.