The protagonist, Jamal, of Something to Tell You is a Freudian psychoanalyst, a “reader of minds and signs”. Being closely acquainted with the seedy “understory” of human life by virtue of his profession, he has few illusions about life, either his own or those of his family and friends. But he has his vulnerabilities, which seem to have their roots in his one great secret. The man who ‘shrives’ his patients also needs to ‘absolve’ himself. So he puts himself on the couch, as it were, and recounts the story of his life to his captive audience, the readers. He tries to pre-empt the readers’ response — “You don’t want to hear about it, but you will, you will.” So, like the Ancient Mariner’s wedding guest, one is made to go through Jamal’s life in retrospect, travelling back in time to London in the Swinging Seventies, when Rock was the alternative to Racism, when “people were always on strike”, Marxism being as fashionable as LSD.

In Jamal’s case, the “myth of the dead father” involves not just his own ever-absent Pakistani father and that of his ex-love, Ajita, but it is also about Karl Marx. As part of the “dissenting” generation that eventually ended up living in “Thatcher’s psyche, if not her anus”, Jamal continues to be haunted by the spectre of Marx. His secret has also got to do with the death of a rich capitalist whose factory was being picketed by his allegedly underpaid workers. But the man in question was not just an exploitative employer; he was also Ajita’s father who was raping her regularly every night. If Jamal ‘murdered’ him, it was not because the man was sacking his workers but because he was traumatizing his beloved.

To complicate matters, Ajita’s father was a Pakistani in England. As a brown man who had made it big in the white world, his persecution by his workers and his sudden death, which, in the absence of sufficient evidence, was attributed to threat or intimidation by the agitators, inevitably acquired a racist angle. Jamal dismissed the fears of racism as “paranoia” but his fellow Asians felt threatened. Years after the death of Ajita’s father, when bombs shatter London in July 2005, and suddenly all coloured men find themselves being looked at with suspicion, the now middle-aged Ajita ruminates, “this is what my father predicted. We would be victims, cattle, rounded up.”

As a half-British and half-Pakistani living in the London suburbs, Jamal’s destiny is to find his own cultural identity. But, in a way, the search is ended even before it has begun, because Jamal knows that he is English. His wife is English, as is his mother and his closest friend. When he travelled to Pakistan with his sister to get ‘acquainted’ with his father, he only felt bored and lost. He was shocked to see his father’s “liberal companions” approving of Reagan and Thatcher — “This was anathema to me, but represented ‘freedom’ in this increasingly Islamised land.” Jamal visited his aunt, who, by her very identity as a poet writing in Urdu and English, qualified as a rebel in Pakistani society. But the words she mouths are so pat as to be ludicrous — “‘I envy the birds,’ she said. ‘They can sing....Only they are free here.’” Jamal has to reject his fatherland. And he is unable to fit his father in the role of a saviour who would solve his dilemmas by bestowing an identity on him. “If I wanted a father, I’d have to find a better one.”

After Jamal has laid all his dead fathers to rest, he finds a new one in Freud, who dutifully helps him to rake them up all over again. But psychoanalysis at least gives Jamal the power to understand his own mind and that of others, which, in turn, helps him reduce his fears. And most important, it teaches him that he does not necessarily have to conform in order to be happy. If life is a disease of which the only remedy is death, then one can survive only by taking wholehearted pleasure in the conflicts of life.

To someone acquainted with Kureishi’s fiction, his new novel has nothing exceptional to offer. All the preoccupations of his previous works are present here — life in the suburbia with its misery and violence, characters of mixed racial origin, the rebellion-without-a-cause of the Seventies, its music, pop culture, and the eventual conservative backlash of the Eighties and the Nineties. Even characters from The Buddha of Suburbia stage a comeback, though in keeping with the advancing years of their author, they have aged too. But age has not dampened the spirit, at least the physical vitality, of the fifty-something Jamal and his friends from the Seventies. There is so much sex — in bedrooms, hotel rooms, brothels, sex clubs or dripping garden sheds — that one feels tempted to ask Jamal the secret of his amazing energy. Considering all this, Something to Tell You would doubtlessly lend itself to an entertaining film. But its merit as a literary work is questionable.

While the novel is laden with characters, their role is mainly to provide variations on the sexual act. They are also recognizable sexual types — the kinky sister with her pierced and tattooed body, the frustrated theatre director who hopes to revamp his life through sex orgies, Jamal’s frigid child-wife and Ajita’s homosexual brother, who inevitably has a languishing partner in a wheelchair. But perhaps the greatest disappointment of the novel is Jamal’s secret, the disclosure of which falls flat on its face, both because Jamal is too shrewd to be seriously disturbed by it and because even those affected by it seem least bothered by the revelation. Raskolnikov is evoked, but the allusion only serves to heighten the emptiness at the heart of this novel. In the end, Jamal, with all his canniness, is really a “sphinx without a secret”, as one of his friends aptly describes him.

To speak in Jamal’s language, Something to Tell You is no more than an instance of its creator’s compulsion to repeat himself in his writings. Kureishi might be enjoying his own symptoms that way, but he could have spared some thought for the reader who does not even have the consolation of getting a hefty fee as compensation for enduring this lengthy session.