There are many English son-and-father books, from Edmund Gosse's Father and Son (1907) to J.R. Ackerley's subversive My Father and Myself (1969). Both those authors were gay, as it happens, and Ackerley even discovered that his father had been a homosexual prostitute when young. It's refreshing, therefore, to find a notably non-gay writer like Kureishi meditating on this archetypal relationship. Indeed, he extends the analysis by also writing about his own children, and his emerging father-child relationship with them.
This book's subtitle, Reading My Father, is clearly meant to be taken in two senses. And Kureishi senior does take some understanding. He feels betrayed when his son decides to visit Pakistan, never having been back himself. In fact he lives between two worlds, despising his Asian roots yet desperately attached to an already dying form of English life -- politeness, social deference, cricket and the keeping up of appearances.
Kureishi is astonished to find his father actually wrote about him in his unpublished books. "He ran his fingers through his long black hair," a father-figure writes of his hippie son, "which he had tied at the back with a pink ribbon." Moreover, he also wrote stories specifically about father-son relations, describing, as well as his own children, his own father, an unhappily-married military officer.
But the book eventually leaves the topic of the father for a more interesting area -- Kureishi's own early life in 1970s London. With its evocations of parties, drugs, promiscuous sex and cultural eclecticism, this is fascinating material. At one point he also contacts and meets V.S. Naipaul, another writer with roots in the sub-continent who had a father who was an aspiring writer.
This fine book is essentially about immigrants and their children. In discussing the American son-of-an-immigrant novelist Philip Roth (who he also met), Kureishi has a vision of how first-generation immigrants are unsure of themselves, sexually repressed and excessively conser-vative, but that their integrated off-spring become "fashionable, exotic, hip." This happened with the Jews in the US and was now happening with the Asians in the UK. Hanif Kureishi himself, it should be noted, is both evidence of, and a major contributor to, this very process. But the London he now inhabits was "that chosen home my father knew was there," he sadly concludes, "but could never reach."
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