SOMETHING TO TELL YOU

Hanif Kureishi (Faber, £16.99)

Kureishi's first novel, The Buddha of Suburbia, was a coming-of-age tale, and his most successful story, the filmscript My Beautiful Launderette, was a portrait of youthful rebellion and racism in Thatcher's Britain.

Now the author is concerned with midlife, but there is plenty else happening in his latest novel, and plenty of reminiscence about lost youth. The rambling plot involves celebrity, drugs, orgies, incest, pornography and murder, with a cast of weird, colourful characters. The narrator, psychoanalyst Jamal, is troubled by lifelong guilt about something. As the book opens, Jamal's best friend, Henry, has fallen in love with his elder sister Miriam, a tattooed and pierced mother of many children by different fathers who lives in a council house. Jamal has separated from his wife, the mother of his 12-year-old son, Rafi.

The reader turns the pages, hoping to find out what happened to cause Jamal's anguish. After such a build-up, the answer - which is revealed in snatches throughout the book - is a bit of a let-down.

There are brilliant flashes - the satire about dinner-party metropolitans, and the passages set in the 1970s, reminded me of the young Kureishi - but I was left with the uneasy sensation that the author had perhaps sacrificed plot and character to make clever points about politics and psychoanalysis.

Hanif Kureishi will be at the Oxford Literary Festival on April 4.