This book is a lurid and prurient piece of fiction. I don’t think my sense of humour is bleak enough to see the “diabolical fun” or the “funny [and] farcical” book the blurbs on the back advertise. Hanif Kureishi’s novella The Nothing is a miserable nightmare.
I see this novella as somewhat of a departure from Kureishi’s work, which I’d previously considered as being focused on the challenges of a postcolonial Britain. For instance, a number of his plays and short stories focus on the immigrant experience of assimilation and second generation immigrants wanting to reclaim their cultural heritage.
Here, though, the concept is much different. The Nothing focuses on an infirm old man, Waldo, a generally well-praised filmmaker on his way out, winning “lifetime achievement awards” as a polite goodbye. He is married to a younger Punjabi wife, Zenab (Zee), and the first scene of the book is Waldo listening through the wall as she has sex with their friend Eddie. There’s a masochism to the scene that compels Waldo to want to hear more, diving into the pain with the deluded belief that by bringing himself closer to the source of his pain he can gain mastery over it. As such, Waldo seems to engineer situations to allow the affair to continue and to gather more and more evidence (or, at the very least, engage in some cuckoldistic voyeurism).
Following the first scene, the book is an episode revenge plot replete with complex mind games and psychological nuance. At least initially, Waldo seems to actively court Eddie on Zee’s behalf and manufactures scenarios that allow their intimacy. It is implied that he has held onto hedonism from the 60s and that he revels in the thrills of the novel—as such, he’s willing to be betrayed as a distorted kind of pleasure [think also Marquis de Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom]. In any case, Waldo allows the couple to continue their amorous trysts so that he can listen, listen with his hearing aid, and eventually film them in his own kind of self-abuse. There’s a brutal scene in which Waldo is consulting his friend Anita, who accuses him of being paranoid. Waldo demands that she root through Eddie’s things and they find sexually explicit photos of other women and, I think, Zee. It’s a scene that churns the stomach in its raw depiction of paranoia and jealousy. It’s a moment Waldo is forced to confront the facts that the line between pleasure and pain is essentially indecipherable and that we cannot master our sorrow by exposing ourselves to it.
The novel is also a novel about devotion, though. Waldo can accept Zee’s infidelity; his wheelchair-bound body is incapable of much more than staring at her privates or using his mouth on her breasts. What Waldo cannot accept is that Zee is not completely devoted to him; he demands that her love be absolute. It’s a cringeworthy perspective that he demands her complete commitment to him, no matter how awful he is to her, which is reversed later on when Eddie refuses to do what Zee demands of him. I won’t spoil that moment, but it is a powerful one that reinforces just how awful every character in this book is.
Waldo’s philosophy of pleasure demands that he and Zee never have sex the same way twice, and he is seemingly a hedonist until he realizes that Zee is not absolutely devoted to him. He can live with her pleasure until her love is no longer exclusive. At that point, he starts sabotaging the lovers in increasingly twisted ways. I admit that I find the psychological nuances of the book somewhat difficult to follow (for instance, how Waldo gives Eddie money as a form of revenge against Zee). I suppose I’m too direct for these kind of games. That said, there are a number of tense and compelling moments where the screw is turned in obscurely villainous ways.
In one scene, Waldo is pressing Zee for details and he critizes Eddie. She defends her lover by justifying his behaviour with a recounting of his past. As it turns out, Eddie, as a young man, was sexually assaulted repeatedly by his teacher. The teacher continues to abuse him even years later and yet Eddie still feels compelled to meet with his former teacher. The chapter reads as a kind of short story of its own and escalates impressively. A scheme emerges where Eddie and his friend threaten to expose the teacher and their blackmail drives the instructor to commit suicide by jumping from a bridge. Eddie lives with the guilt and has not told the story to anyone else. Of course, Zee tells the story to humanize Eddie and, while Waldo does not initially believe it, he banks the information for later revenge.
Waldo exploits Eddie’s abuse later on in the novel. When Eddie and Zee are out at a restaurant having a great time and partying, Waldo calls and arranges for a waiter to deliver Eddie a message, claiming he will love it. The waiter goes to Eddie and whispers the teacher’s nickname for him, inspiring terror that this abuser is reaching him from beyond the grave. It’s a secret code that only a few people could know: Eddie, Zee, the deceased teacher, and only one other friend who is sworn to secrecy. The sheer terror the word inspires in Eddie is awful and forms a glorious parallel to his own torment of his abuser.
Without getting into the details too much, Waldo tries to expose Eddie as a fraud who exploits an array of women for financial gain. In a somewhat obscure little scheme, Eddie seems to have marked Zee as a last big grift, presumably waiting for Waldo’s inevitably prompt death to profit by proxy from Waldo’s will. It’s actually a little more sinister than that, since Zee and Eddie actively plot Waldo’s death. Waldo, though, tries to stay one step ahead of them and creates a final documentary about his own murder, which he forces Eddie to watch in a sadistic turn (Waldo really rides the line of sadomasochism, hey?). The climax of the book is pretty intense in that respect and Eddie is placed in a position between two contradictory forces, primed to but unable to murder his rival.
I would describe the novel as engaging, but not necessarily long lasting. The dialogue in the book is terse, probably more so than would be expected of a playwright. The characters are vile. The more enduring themes of adjusting to postcolonial life (there is some of this with Zee leaving her restrictive family and children behind…) give way to psychologically complex, if repugnant, considerations. I powered through the book in a day or two, but it’s not one that I think I’d be excited to revisit. It’s a kind of noir in the vein of Vladimir Nabokov’s Laughter in the Dark, but the elegantly dark humour of Nabokov is replaced here with more crass and abrasive vocabulary.
I usually end with “happy reading!”, both an imperative statement and a kind of mantra. For this book, I don’t think that’s the best descriptor. It’s more like spending a few hours with the most miserable couple you know and then wanting to avoid them forever—that is, unless there’s a film adaptation (which I would definitely still watch). Happy reading?
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