In examining father’s life, a son finds his own artistry
Regardless of the loaded subjects Hanif Kureishi has addressed in his work — from the interracial, homosexual love story in “My Beautiful Laundrette’’ to the emotional brutality of a man’s extramarital affair in “Intimacy’’ — his tone always remains cool and measured. His memoir of his relationship with his father has a similarly premeditated sheen, but that doesn’t diminish the book’s bracing and touching honesty. In a sense, the memoir is a long time coming, given Kureishi’s well-discussed use of his family as the basis for fictional characters.
A cleverly framed and well-observed narrative of Kureishi’s father’s life lays groundwork for Kureishi’s later discussion of his own writerly development. As the book begins, Kureishi sits in his study, alone, and opens the manuscript for “An Indian Adolescence,’’ his father’s final novel, discovered after his death. Shannoo (Kureishi’s father’s nickname) wrote constantly and was rejected often. The manuscript, describing a young man’s progression from teenage years to early adulthood in a wealthy Bombay family, matches or closely echoes the facts of Shannoo’s own life. Where pieces are missing from his father’s account, Kureishi reads his uncle Omar’s memoir, one of two the nationally renowned Pakistani sports commentator and columnist published. Where the two accounts differ, Kureishi makes his own decisions, managing to sidestep easy judgments of his father.
Cut out of stiffer cloth than his siblings, Shannoo was innately drawn to the British way of life; Kureishi paints a vivid portrait of a buttoned-up soul with this book. Shannoo married during the 1950s and began what Kureishi calls “his own family or empire’’ in the suburbs of London, never visiting his ancestral Pakistan. He worked, however, for many years at a quiet job in the Pakistani Embassy in London. Some anecdotes in his father’s novel understandably surprise Kureishi, such as Shannoo’s deflowering in a brothel — but they amuse him more than repulse him. The author is also by turns frustrated by and sympathetic with evident competition between Shannoo and his brothers. Kureishi wonders occasionally if writing this memoir might be too invasive, calling it “a cross between love-making and an autopsy.’’ However, he also can’t look away, asking, “How can plain curiosity be unkind?’’ These recurrent bursts of self-doubt ring a bit false; Kureishi dives into his father’s manuscript and life elsewhere with great energy.
But what else do we learn about Shannoo? Trying not to duplicate his own father’s distance from his children, Kureishi’s father was active in his son’s life — from teaching him how to play cricket to teaching him, by example, how to love books. This involvement, though, only went so far; Kureishi acknowledges and accepts that his father was willing to share knowledge with him but did not want his son’s ambitions to surpass his own. The two men were friends, and the son certainly read and commented on his father’s writing, but the relationship was not productive.
If his father made the rules, Kureishi’s other relatives gave him a sense of how he might live — his lilting descriptions of them betray his natural attraction to them. Though his “most glamorous uncle Omar’’ occasionally lapsed into alcoholic dissipation, the life he lived, full of celebrities, travel, and excitement, clearly mystified and impressed young Hanif. Of another uncle, who lived surrounded by books in the English countryside and directed a school for autistic children with humanity and respect for the students, Kureishi says: “Just being the sort of man he was taught me a lot.’’
Kureishi gradually takes over the memoir as he begins to recount his own artistic biography. Kureishi’s candidness about his struggles with influence is arresting and believable. He makes no bones about the difficulty of inheriting his father’s passion: “Revolt as discontent, as anguish, as individualism not conformity, thinking one’s own thoughts as opposed to following others . . . [T]he puzzling thing about rebellion is that the order you wish to defy is so deep and hidden within yourself that you cannot even begin to know it.’’ Still, Hanif manages: He brings white girls home, takes drugs with his friends, finds solace in the punk music that was emerging in England at the time. He adopts a lifestyle very different from the one he knew as a child.
To his credit, his portrayal of himself as a young ruffian, of a sort, brings his father’s portrait into relief. Kureishi eventually pursues and completes a degree at the University of London, intoxicated by knowledge and exposure to French films and American authors. To distance himself further, he moves away from home in the 1970s, upsetting his father.
Late in the book, Kureishi states that “My Ear at His Heart’’ has “given my father what he wanted when he sat down to write each morning: his stories have been read, pored over, lived with, become the subject of conversation.’’ One senses that an unturned stone has been turned here, and with satisfaction. The richest thing about the memoir, apart from the emotion beneath so much of it, are its images: young Kureishi bathing with, and literally bathing, his father; a friend of the teenage Kureishi wearing a school uniform ripped to shreds at a party; Kureishi himself sitting in a room reading the manuscript. Kureishi’s work as a screenwriter has taught him something about montage. Nevertheless, the open and fair-minded look he gives his father and himself, taking the good with the bad, has the clarity of a perfectly focused black-and-white photograph.
Max Winter’s “The Pictures’’ was published in 2007. 
