Gabriel's Gift is the fourth novel by Hanif Kureishi to appear within the last decade. During the same period, this acclaimed British writer has also produced two collections of short stories, written and directed for stage and screen, and co-edited The Faber Book of Pop. This seems like a lot.
The Buddha of Suburbia won the Whitbread Prize for Best First Novel in 1990. Kureishi followed this success with The Black Album in 1995. Set in London, both novels are pitched at the level of the social, where the seething cacophony of ethnic mix, racial politics and rival religions form the core. With his third novel, Intimacy, Kureishi shifted register to the private, in a tepid exploration of love.
Gabriel's Gift maintains the move away from the overtly social and political. Through the experiences of a 15-year-old London schoolboy, parental treachery becomes an opportunity to assert artistic independence. Gabriel's father, a layabout musician who blew his chances of fame when he fell off his platform heels during a concert with The Leather Pigs, has been thrown out of the house. Gabriel's mother quickly takes another lover and tries to push Gabriel into a career as a showbiz lawyer. Confined to the selvage of his parents' lives, Gabriel takes refuge in his creative gift.
Kureishi's writing for stage and screen (My Beautiful Laundrette, 1984, received an Oscar nomination for Best Screenplay) is evident in the series of honed vignettes which make up this novel. The style is breezy, assured, self-reflexive. As Karim, in The Buddha of Suburbia, was inspired by pop-idol Charlie Hero, so Gabriel is encouraged by a fortuitous meeting with rock star Lester Jones. Karim and Charlie Hero make a guest appearance in the restaurant where Gabriel has been commissioned to do a portrait of the proprietor.
For all its humour and ingenuity, there's a numbness at the heart of Gabriel's Gift. The trauma and angst necessary to Gabriel's act of assertion have been effectively censored by Kureishi's predictable style. Hurt is glossed, never sifted, always distracted by some new gimmick. Gabriel's father moves from a state of semi-narcosis to teacher cum guru for a new generation of would-be pop icons. Again, Kureishi avoids dealing with the transition on the deeper front. This is a captious post-modern fairytale where everything happens at the level of advertisement.
Ger Mulgrew is a writer and critic