Hanif Kureishi’s reputation precedes him. And it is bad news. He kissed and he told. The publication of his last novel followed the break-up of his personal relationship and he dished up the dirt. Intimacy was well-reviewed but garnered acres of publicity as a graphic chronicle of his lover’s inadequacies. So much the better for Kureishi, but what sort of man would do that to the mother of his young sons?
He is sitting in the Octagon bar of Dublin's Clarence Hotel. He's never been here before and likes the funky decor. He's sipping mineral water, exhausted by a restive night before catching an early-morning flight from Heathrow, tending to yawn, trying to hide it. He is here to promote his latest novel, Gabriel's Gift, about middle age and overcoming failure. The break-up of a relationship features indirectly, but this time it's not his. So why did he do it last time round?
He didn't, at least not really. "It wasn't like everyone thought it was," he says. "Everything just happened to come at the same time, and a lot was misinterpreted." He fiddles with elastic bands on his wrist. "They're there so I can fidget and stop biting my nails," he says, and smiles through not-so-gleaming molars, proving he just might be human after all. Then he sits forward, tells me the batteries in my tape recorder are flat, promises to talk more slowly.
"Intimacy was written as a confessional book," he says. "It was a first-person narrative and about a man leaving his partner. It was a hard and nasty book in the way that partings are. It was full of strong feelings. But I tell stories. I write about things I remember and what emerges is something based on these ideas. For instance, I was writing a story the other day about a blind woman who used to live down the road from us in the late 1960s, but the story will not be about her but about what might have happened."
He didn't mean to court all the amazing publicity, he says, didn't set out to be a marketing stooge. "It was dreadful really, and I hated that the focus was on me rather than the book." And the children? "I wasn't worried about upsetting the kids. I mean, all parents upset their kids. They upset me. They drive me crazy but I can't live without them." Home is in Hammersmith with a two year-old son by his new partner. His former partner lives in the next street with their twin seven-year-old sons, whom he sees every day. Is she still mad with him? He shrugs uneasily. "Hardly. She knows me. We have to get on together. Talk. We have to bring up the children." Kureishi believes nothing is static. We are on a path. "We live life in phases, and have different relationships and expectations as things change and time passes. No one expects things to stay the same."
Desire is important, but he accepts it has a dual role, making one unhappy as well as happy. "Too much purpose keeps desire away. It is bad to be busy all the time. You sometimes need to be bored in order to do things differently, to change, get things together better." Slight and of short build, he holds himself remarkably erect. He has dark hair edging back from his forehead, slipping down the nape of his neck. He wears a black polo-neck sweater, jeans, shoes that are slightly scuffed. He is mild-mannered and relaxed. He likes to shoot the breeze, as he says, chat, and go for coffee every Friday with film director Stephen Frears. He collaborated with him on the acclaimed My Beautiful Launderette in 1986. It made Kureishi's name, even if it also raised some hackles among the close-knit Asian community for its depiction of homosexuality. Kureishi's background is a cross-cultural tale of a mixed marriage.
His father came to London from Pakistan, worked in his country's embassy and married an English woman. "My father wanted to be a writer but never made it. He left his country and didn't go back." His father is now dead, but Kureishi's sister Yasmin has been critical of her brother for inventing a working-class background. Kureishi responds by saying he's up against it as the only writer in the family. "I tell it all from my point of view. They have their stories too, only we don't hear them because they are not the writers." Kureishi writes sympathetically about the father in Gabriel's Gift. Told from the viewpoint of the father's 15-year-old son, it is about a man who never made it as a rocker but who manages to redeem himself by overcoming bitterness. Kureishi is 47. He is not a failure. "I'm doing what I've always wanted to do, but middle age is a time when you can see your whole life, the beginning and the end and it's the first time you have a sense of time running out." Kureishi feels free as a writer. "It's love rather than discipline. With experience I have become more confident."
He starts the day most mornings at 7 a.m. and writes until midday. He listens to music, beginning with Bach and Mahler, moving on to jazz. But he is interrupted by his child, his partner, ordinary life. "Sometimes I'm begging for the phone to ring. It's boring in a room all day by yourself - though continuity is important and it's useful to have had the experience of solitude." He's not a natural loner. He liked growing up in suburban Bromley. He started writing at the age of 12. He had hoped to be a professional cricketer, but studied philosophy in King's College, London, instead. He thrives in a metropolis, likes Sundays in the city: the galleries, parks, hanging out. He tries not to go on holiday. "I hate tourism." The countryside doesn't appeal to him either. "It bores the ass off me. I want to get out of it as quickly as I can." He might have been a politician "just to see if I could change anything". He's a vegetarian and, while not religious, he is interested in "the concept of religion as a means of social and sexual control".
Following the success of his first film, he wrote the screenplay for Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, but it didn't make him a mint, and then he directed London Kills Me. His first novel, The Buddha of Suburbia, was published in 1990 and won the Whitbread Best First Novel award, and The Black Album was published in 1993. He has also written plays, as well as two collections of short stories, Love in a Blue Time and Midnight All Day. "It takes a long time to make a living out of writing," he says. "It's a bourgeois profession. It's about dreaming and scheming. The whole business of writing has changed totally since I went into it. Think of the marketing alone. But if you are a successful writer by middle age, everything else is a bonus." He describes his approach as minimalist. "I no longer have to get everything down." He doesn't read a lot but admires Chekhov and Roddy Doyle, the poetry of Frank O'Hara and Wallace Stevens.
Kureishi has recently been working on a film adaptation of Intimacy with French director Patrice Chereau. Despite the title, it is not solely based on his novel, but also on a short story, `Nightlight'. It is about a couple who meet weekly for sex. They are unable to communicate in any other way. The film recently won a Golden Bear award at the Berlin Film Festival, and it contains 35 minutes of explicit sex. "It's not pornographic," Kureishi is quick to point out. "It is about communicating. Conversation was more dangerous than sex."
Writing comes easier now. "It's experience, I know how to get the images the way I want them. It's not like that when I take a photograph. I'm disappointed. But I don't have the technique."
He teaches creative writing in the Royal Court in London, but is not enthralled by the young. "I prefer people who are older, more reflective," he says. Maybe it's his time to be more reflective as well.
Gabriel's Gift is published by Faber and Faber, at £9.99 in UK