On the Couch, Chatting to Himself

Kadin Noel

21 August 2008

Making an attempt to decide how best to inform his story, Dowell settles on a tried-and-true approach. Not that I assumed I'd a talent for listening then, or realized you might make a profession of it.

I spoke all the time, naturally, but just to myself. Something to tell you, in spite of its title, is basically 376 pages of Jamal speaking to himself. It involves, among other elements, a derailed love affair, a murder and a nicked Ingres drawing. The novel opens in London in the Blair years. Jamal has a successful practice but is estranged from his hypochondriac better half, Josephine. His boy, Rafi, a fan of gangsta rap, shuffles between his folks and hopes vaguely that they can reconcile ; his garrulous best buddy, Henry, a theater director, lives in a state of chronic outrage at Blair's coalition with Bush in Iraq ; and his sister, Miriam -- multiply tattooed, pierced and Rabelaisian in her proportions -- supports her brood of kids, dogs, pussies and hangers-on by selling drugs and engaging in petty graft. Even as the doings of his loved ones enthrall Jamal, however, he is haunted by the past, and as he proceeds to explain his quotidian London life -- a life, one might note, that regularly sounds more like that of a successful English author and screenwriter than a practicing psychoanalyst -- he unearths himself drawn back to his student days, when he shared a place with his best buddies, Valentin and Wolf, and was in love with Ajita, the pretty and sad child of an immigrant Indian factory owner. Ajita, he learns, is keeping back a particularly dark secret, a secret that at last will force Jamal to make a sequence of threatening selections. Something to tell you, which truly gathers momentum just in its last 3rd, can be dramatic, moving and terribly funny. But the novel suffers from his call to draft it as a speech without a listener. Kureishi's poetry is replete with use blunders and can be, on occasion, embarrassing. ( If envy was the vindaloo of love, I'd imagined her tongue burning, and such a fire causing her to spill her truth. ). And yet Something to tell you, even if it drove me up the wall, also charmed me. For all its longueurs, the novel is replete with passages of great pathos and humor. Like the town it mourns and celebrates, Something to tell you is uncontrollable and intermittently handsome.