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Summary
Summary
The Nothing is Hanif Kureishi's powerful new work: a tense and captivating exploration of lust, helplessness, and deception.
Author Notes
Hanif Kureishi won England's prestigious Whitbread Prize for his first novel, The Buddha of Suburbia. His screenplays include Sammy and Rosie Get Laid and My Beautiful Laundrette, which received an Oscar nomination for Best Screenplay. His other works include the novels The Black Album and Gabriel's Gift and the short story collection Love in a Blue Time. He lives in London. (Publisher Fact Sheets)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
The narrator of Whitbread Prize-winner Kureishi's caustic latest (after The Last Word) is a dirty old man named Waldo. He's an angry, impotent, but highly successful filmmaker who suspects his younger wife, Zee, is having an affair with their friend Eddie, a flaneur who's been hanging around claiming to chronicle Waldo's glittering past. Waldo, still obsessed by sex but plagued with declining health, spends most of his days trapped in a wheelchair in his London apartment, cooking up schemes to catch Zee and Eddie, destroy the latter, and hold on to the former. He schemes with his actress friend Anita, but, after she helps him gather damning evidence about Eddie, he's pretty sure she's turned against him as well. There is not a decent soul or breath of fresh air within these pages; Kureishi rises fiendishly to the challenge of creating disagreeable characters, and true to form indulges in bald, unrelenting talk of sex acts and sex organs. There's a bit of tormented Hamlet in Waldo, but little philosophy or meat in this wicked little revenge tale. (Jan.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
A successful and aging film director suspects those he's closest to may be plotting against him.Kureishi's eighth novel (The Last Word, 2015, etc.) is narrated with a blackhearted charm by Waldo, whose illustrious movie career and sexual history are, to his regret, mostly behind him. (He is "old, sick, right out of semen," he informs us in the first sentence.) He putters about his London mansion in his wheelchair ("my chariot of ire"), questioning the attentions of his wife, Zenab, and Eddie, a journalist and fan organizing events on his behalf. Is Eddie as interested in Waldo's art as he says he is? Is Zenab's love for Waldo as pure as she claims? And are the two of them carrying on an affair behind Waldo's back (indeed, in the next room)? Kureishi's slim novel isn't very complex in terms of plot, but it argues that you can have some of your fears confirmed and still be consumed by an unhealthy paranoid attitude. When Eddie disappears with a loan, Waldo calls in an actor friend to investigate, eagerly receiving sexual and financial gossip about the man allegedly cuckolding him. The story is sodden with soap-opera turns (slaps to the face, a scheme to gather enemies in one place), but the book thrives on Waldo's voice, electric with resentment. "I am like an aged ape in a suspended cage in the corner, unable to even spit at the guests," he fumes; recalling his film career, he intones that "we lure audiences into a trap of pleasure by letting them watch crimes." It's hard to love a character so sour, but a man with nothing to lose who's turned resentment into an art form is hard to turn your eyes away from.A short, spiky meditation on mortality delivered with nihilistic glee. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Illustrious movie director Waldo's body has withered into a shell of what it once was. Beset by a litany of diseases, real and imagined, Waldo is nearly on his deathbed when he is dealt another blow: his long-suffering wife, Zee, might be having an affair with Eddie. Eddie, who has been more than an acquaintance and less than a friend for over thirty years, might have scheming motives of his own, but that's beside the point. Consumed by jealousy (I don't want her to be happy. I just want her to be with me. Is that too much to ask?), Waldo becomes obsessed with seeking revenge. Worse, the unfortunate side effect of Waldo's undiminished libido is that his dear wife is rarely more than a mere sex object. Even Kureishi's (The Last Word, 2015) gifts for dialogue and edgy humor are not enough to rescue this claustrophobic tale. And it's hard to be amused by Waldo when he shares this thought: even these days, a woman is the ultimate luxury item; a diamond, a Rolls-Royce, a Leonardo in your living room. We've had enough of misogynistic men, even in jest.--Apte, Poornima Copyright 2018 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
"ONE night, when I am old, sick, right out of semen, and don't need things to get any worse, I hear the noises again," is the arresting first sentence of Hanif Kureishi's new novel, "The Nothing." The man hearing noises is Waldo, a Bafta-winning filmmaker now staring down his 80s, in a wheelchair and in terminal physical decline, who sits at the window of his Victoria flat, like Jimmy Stewart in "Rear Window," observing the goings-on of his neighbors through binoculars. "There is a world within this London mansion block," he notes, and later: "Dinner parties are more riveting than wars, and are always an occasion for a close-up. But there's no sex." Hang on. I thought you said this was a Hanif Kureishi book? I want my money back. Kureishi is the Londoner (of Pakistani descent) who wrote the 1985 Daniel Day Lewis film "My Beautiful Laundrette" and arrived on the literary scene with the 1990 novel "The Buddha of Suburbia," a bicurious picaresque whose wily mixed-race hero bed-hopped his way out of the London suburbs. "Always put your penis first," a wise old writer tells the main character in "The Last Word" (2014), a directive every Kureishi protagonist has done his best to heed, with Waldo no exception. A once studiy young buck in flares, love beads, shoulder-length black hair and "an ass you'd pay to bite," he now lives with his wife, Zee, 22 years his junior, who feeds and washes his failing body. "I am, I've realized at last, the sort of fool who wants to be loved exclusively," he says. But Waldo's imagination is not going quietly into the night. Convinced Zee is having an affair with a longtime pal of his, a down-at-the-heels film critic and Soho gadfly called Eddie who spends nights at their flat under the pretext of helping Zee with her nursing duties, Waldo goes to bed, feigns sleep, turns up his hearing aid and lets his mind run wild: "Working with sound and my imagination, I envisage the angles and cuts, making the only substantial films I can manage these days, mind movies." The idea of a celibate Hanif Kureishi hero tormented by the very urges he once indulged is an excellent one - think Philip Roth in a chastity belt. Given the current cultural and political climate, in fact, that idea may have even more than usual appeal. The unfettered license that male writers have enjoyed when it comes to holding up every stain in the sheets as a palimpsest of their smarting, solipsistic souls is due for an overhaul. Sexual jealousy has produced many a major and minor classic, from Saul Bellow's "Herzog" to Patrick Hamilton's "Hangover Square" and Julian Barnes's "Before She Met Me," but the trick of these books lies in the skill with which the writer evokes, through the heat haze of the protagonist's obsession, the bobbing horizon line of reality, however fleetingly glimpsed. There must be more to "Lolita" than just Humbert Humbert's lust. Here, Kureishi runs into trouble. There's really nobody in the book besides Waldo, the other characters existing mostly to ferry congratulatory bouquets to his much-garlanded imagination. "Waldo, you've got the filthiest mind of anyone I've met," says Zee, who nevertheless supplies him with sordid stories of Eddie's past involving sodomy and rape. "Your mind resembles a roaring wind tunnel," admonishes his movie star friend Anita, but she too brings him reports of Eddie's affairs, peccadilloes and (as Zee puts it) "orgies in his school uniform with important people." But what a stroke of luck! The world is exactly as florid as the fantasist first imagined it to be. The book is a little like one of those fake knots that, once pulled, turn out to be just a piece of string. Even paranoiacs can be plotted against, of course, but there's a word for the kind of writing in which too neat a sense of reality is made to line up with loamy sexual fantasy: pornography. I suspect Kureishi knows this. That pre-emptive shrug of a title almost defies us to take his book seriously. "As a reader I'm done with literature," Waldo declares as he asks Anita to read him one of his favorite detective stories again. "I only want fun." But fun for a writer and fun for a reader are different things, and while it may have been fun for Kureishi to record the most gleefully obscene details of Waldo's recollected sex life with Zee, it is rather more arduous work for readers to square that with the devoted nurse they had been picturing a few pages previously: one minute a Florence Nightingale, the next a lithe vixen who slaps Waldo and attempts to smother him with a pillow. The behavior that might have driven her to such an act is carefully elided, if not hard to imagine. For all his self-obsession, Waldo shows little instinct for the chilly self-appraisal to which Bellow subjected Moses Herzog: "To his parents, he had been an ungrateful child. To his country, an indifferent citizen. To his brothers and his sister, affectionate but remote. With his friends, an egotist. With love, lazy. With brightness, dull. With power, passive. With his own soul, evasive. Satisfied with his own severity, positively enjoying the hardness and factual rigor of his judgment, he lay on his sofa. ..." That final sentence is a killer, with Bellow dinging Herzog for the complacency and self-congratulation even accurate self-knowledge can breed. Ouch. Compared with that, Kureishi is still on the beginner's slopes, practicing his snowplow. Whether you enjoy this book is very much down to how much of a jolt you can get from its epigrams, most of them loitering in the 25-watt range: "the libido, like Elvis and jealousy, never dies"; "a saint is only someone who has been under-researched"; "boring people are always popular. They never do anything unexpected." All of which have the requisite cynical snarl but collapse at the gentlest inquiry. "The imagination is the most dangerous place on earth," Waldo asserts, but Kureishi has supplied him with the safest possible paddock in which to roam: a world carefully Waldoized, confirming his every suspicion and offering his steamy imaginings the least possible pushback. Where's the danger in that? TOM shone, the actingfilm criticfor The Sunday Times of London, is at work on a book about Christopher Nolan.
Library Journal Review
Initially, there were two: aging filmmaker Waldo and his 22-years-younger wife of 20 years, Zee. Bed- and wheelchair-bound for three years, Waldo has "been expecting to die any day," he admits. "I was enjoying my decline and slipping away cheerfully, and now this happens." Because now there are three: Eddie, "scamp, ligger, and freeloader" for 30-plus years, who's also a movie journalist and "self-avowed expert" on Waldo's work, seems to have moved in, not only into Waldo's London flat but into Zee's bed as well. Waldo improvises a revenge plan, which requires growing his players by two. So now there are five: Waldo's celluloid muse Anita and Eddie's manager, Gibney. With the help of whispering waiters, heavy BAFTA awards, and a final cup of scalding tea, Waldo relentlessly directs the scenes to ensure "posterity won't miss a moment." Writer/playwright/screenwriter Kureishi (The Buddha of Suburbia) enacts wicked vengeance on weakness and betrayal in a narrative starring a fading megalomaniac. VERDICT Libraries serving urban, cosmopolitan readers should prepare for ardent Kureishi fans; new readers, however, might opt for the author's earlier fare, as the characters here might prove too predictable, even downright tedious.-Terry Hong, Smithsonian -BookDragon, Washington, DC © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
