The Nothing by Hanif Kureishi

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?

Masks by Fumiko Enchi

    It’s rare these days to feel myself so unmoored by a book. At almost no point could I predict where Fumoki Enchi’s Masks was going, and the book felt surprisingly fresh despite originally being published in 1958. I will do my best to explain the premise, but it’s going to be a challenge.

Let’s start with the central characters:

1. Ibuki: A professor-type who is married to Sadako, with whom he has a child.

2. Mikame: Ibuki’s friend and a bachelor professor-type who’s a bit of a philanderer.

3. Mieko: A poet of some renown whose son Akio married Yasuko.

4. Yasuko: A widow who has continued to live with her mother-in-law follow Akio’s death.

5. Harume: A beautiful resident of Mikeo’s household.

    The first four of the characters above have varying interest in spiritualism, and when Ibuki and Mikame run into each other at the coffee shop at the start of the novel, they immediately recollect a seance they had attended with Yasuko. The seance is presented as suspect, but the fear of the medium speaking French and describing a situation echoing Akio’s death incites fear in Yasuko and she grabs Ibuki’s hand. There’s a strange erotic power in the moment that leaves its witnesses in an ambiguous situation.

    From there, the novel progresses along such strange lines. The four central characters visit a mask maker, whose daughter provides them with a kind of gallery tour with the masks haunting the characters in various ways. Following that, some last minute changes of plans force Ibuki and Yasuko onto a train ride together alone. The thing is, it may not have been pure chance. Rumours of a strange closeness between Yasuko and her mother-in-law pervade the text and while she rides the train with Ibuki, there’s an extraordinarily tense and engaging scene. Yasuko explains to Ibuki how she feels Mieko is manipulating her life, ominously pulling all kinds of strings and possessing her as if a spirit. The conversation makes me think of Hitchcock films at their best (is Strangers on a Train too on the nose?), or other modern noirs (à la The Invisible Guest). The tension and intrigue in the conversation is exquisite because it remains unclear whether Yasuko is paranoid or whether there are actually some terrible forces at work. Though both Yasuko and Ibuki are interested in one another, Yasuko suspects that Mieko is trying to manipulate her into partnering with Ibuki for obscure and shadowy reasons. In an act of defiance, she announces that she will get Mikame to marry her—though even that move may have been predetermined by her mother-in-law.

    While the train arrives at the station, the book goes off the rails.

    The novel shifts several times. In one section, the narrator presents a lengthy essay Mieko wrote in her younger years in which she analyzes a character from The Tale of Genji. Admittedly, I’m not familiar with the source material so I’m not able to comment on the incisiveness of the essay or its credibility in-context; its relevance is expounded upon later. Then, despite agreeing to marry Mikame and engaging in courtship, Yasuko maintains a secret affair with Ibuki. The rest of the novel involves private detectives, secret twins, unwanted pregnancies, secret movies, and mysterious plots against characters. The perpetual changes to the plot made this book unpredictable and thoroughly enjoyable.

    Overall, the book was profoundly compelling. I was engrossed in the strange dynamics influencing the characters and felt compelled to pause and reflect as if I were sleuthing my way through a mystery novel. Some of the moments are just magnificent in their quiet tension, especially since the possibility of supernatural forces continually looms in the background. In some ways the atmosphere is similar to a book like The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters, where the haunting is always uncertain; the haunting may simply be a side-effect of characters’ psychologies. 

    One scene I’ve already alluded to—the conversation on the train—sets up the central premise of the book so beautifully. To add to the effect, there’s a parallel later on in the novel that is equally tense and enthralling. At one point, Sadako confronts Mikame about the relationship between her husband and Yasuko and the uncertain nature of the book exacerbates the tension wonderfully.

    There’s another scene near the halfway mark of the novel that has a hypnotic quality akin to a Twin Peaks monologue. For context, Yasuko’s husband died in an avalanche and his body couldn’t be found until the spring thaw. Yasuko recounts to her mother-in-law a dream that she had, and given the fact that even small phenomena are charged with meaning, it’s clear that this dream is an omen of something horrible. Enchi is a master of the craft of developing that quiet tension. Yasuko describes the dream as follows:

“This time was by far the worst. Do you remember, right after the accident, how I went up with the search party? They gave each of us a long steel rod to poke down in the snow and hunt for buried objects with. It was frightening—I kept thinking, ‘What if Akio is down in the snow and I stab him with this by mistake?’---but every time I thrust down, when I pulled up the rod again, there in the snow would be a tiny deep hole of a blue that was so pure, so clear, so beautiful, it took my breath away. My arms have never forgotten the feeling of thrusting down…but tonight in my dream I did stab Akio with that rod. I stabbed his dead face straight in the eye” (63).

The dream offers such a viscerally gruesome image that retains some nice symbolic significance in the grand scheme of the novel. These moments really elevate the tone away from the academic register of some of its earliest chapters and into a more haunting domain.

    But if the book is unsettling for its central conversations, it is made more so by the fact that there’s no clear character for readers to grasp onto. The main character seemed to fluctuate and I was continually unclear if I ought to spend my energy predominantly on Ibuki or Yasuko or Mieko or Mikame or someone else; the narration cycled between them charitably, which is a great touch. Normally when we think of third person omniscient narrators we have the belief that we’re getting the most transparent account, but somehow that did not feel true here; because the novel orbits these characters in nearly equal measure, you never really get your footing. It’s an interesting technique that I usually only see achieved with unreliable narrators giving first-person accounts.

    To be clear, the above is not a complaint. Instead, I think it enhances the text and provides for opportunities which would not be available otherwise. Moreover, the unified vision of the book seems to be achieved more thoroughly by separating its characters. Early in the text, Mikame and Ibuki discuss the relationship between Mieko and Yasuko and Mikame compares them to a painting. They debate who is more spirit and who is more shaman between Yasuki and Mieko. Ibuko compares them to a painting:

“In T’ang and Sung paintings of beautiful women or in a Moronobu print of a courtesan, the main figure is always twice the size of her attendants. It’s the same with Buddhist triads: the sheer size of the main image makes the smaller bodhisattvas on either side that much more approachable. Perspective has nothing to do with it, so at first the imbalance is disturbing, but then it has a way of drawing you in …. Anyway, to me Mieko is the large-sized courtesan, and Yasuko is the little-girl attendant at her side” (13).

This passing description comes up a few more times in the text and towards the end of the novel I realized just how actively Enchi achieves this effect in literary form with the characters in Masks. They are always competing for dominance and their relationships are always presented in relief to one another. When I put that approach together with the early description of the painting, the book just clicked and its cohesion was exemplary.

    I am trying to avoid spoilers as best I can, so you’ll have to take it on trust that Enchi ‘turns the screw’ more and more as the story progresses. The stakes continue to increase, the tension continues to grow, and the mystery behind character motives only increases your sense of dread for them.

    Beyond the compelling story and characters of the book, Enchi’s literary style is well-achieved. From the literary essay section, it’s clear that Enchi is able to operate in different modes. While most of the novel reads as matter-of-fact, there are passages that  are aflame with poetry. In one of the closing pages of the novel, the scene’s imagery encapsulates the mood so serenely, balancing beauty with pinches of dread:

“One day, when a mottled layer of ashen clouds was deepening in the sky, and the air shone with a fine, soft drizzle, he got off the bus at Arashiyama and proceeded on foot.

Beside a narrow bamboo-lined path he spotted a stone marker engraved ‘Site of the Shrine in the Fields’ and halted, hands in the pockets of his Burberry raincoat. The sight of the desolate torii gate and shrine—exactly as described in the essay—aroused in him no strong desire to gain a closer view. [...] Muttering the temple name over to himself, he followed a stone pathway into the compound. Standing amid the fresh greenery inside were several tall chestnut trees, whose cream-colored corollas scattered a shower of powdery blossoms into the breeze, sprinkling Ibuki’s hair and shoulders with their petals. Their spacious grounds were hushed and deserted. Over the high bell tower drooped sprays of golden flowers—broom, perhaps—with the unstudied grace of a discarded kimono” (135).

I love the way the passage balances the light and the dark: “powdery blossoms” and “petals” and yet the grounds are “hushed and deserted.” There is no unqualified joy in the moment, and given the plot context it’s a perfect alignment of different elements. I suppose it would be classed as pathetic fallacy, though I think it goes beyond that.

    I will not spoil the ending of the book, so you’ll have to trust me that it’s great. Even until the very last pages I wasn’t sure where the book was going but nothing ever felt out of place or out of align with the logic of the Masks universe. The book begins on a mystery and ends on a mystery, which allows you to reevaluate other moments throughout the text. I repeat that the book remains fresh. 

    As I come up to the third page of this review, I feel that I have not yet said enough about Masks. There are many layers to it and many that are difficult to articulate. All I can say is that this book is one of the best spontaneous purchases I’ve made from an overstocked book store based on cover alone.

    Happy reading, everyone!