Novel of the week The Nothing

Faber 176pp £14.99 The Week Bookshop £12.99

Hanif Kureishi’s seventh novel has a “plot like something out of a film noir”, said Fiona Wilson in The Times. Waldo, the narrator, is an ageing film director whose glory days are long behind him. Once “potent and celebrated” (and with “an ass”, as he puts it, “you’d pay to bite”), he is now impotent and in a wheelchair, cared for – “bowel movements and all” – by his younger wife, Zee. The couple share their West London mansion flat with a journalist named Eddie, whom Waldo suspects is having an affair with Zee. (Eddie is also, he discovers, planning to swindle him out of his life savings.) And so Waldo plots “what you feel is his last great masterpiece” – a vicious revenge on the “thief” in his midst. A “sardonic tale” about a man struggling with loss, illness and “fading relevance”, The Nothing is “diabolical fun”.

It is also exceptionally silly, said Anthony Cummins in the Literary Review. Like Houellebecq and Knausgård – two writers he admires – Kureishi (above) relies on a “vaguely boorish frisson”. One character is described as “not a woman a man can look at for long without wanting to put his penis in her mouth”. Eddie, a “prodigious cunnilinguist”, is “the Jacques Cousteau of pussy work”. While it’s “easy to be po-faced about superannuated bad boys”, The Nothing lacks the “capering quality” of Kureishi’s best work. I disagree, said Sukhdev Sandhu in The Observer: this is a pleasurable, funny novel studded with “tart epigrams”, “sexual riffs” and Shakespearean allusions. While “death and dolefulness” permeate its pages, so does a “pleasingly lubricious impishness”.