Free at last from the chains of marriage. So why the long face?
Midnight All Day by Hanif Kureishi, Faber, £9.99, pp217
Narcissistic and cruel middle-aged men, young nymphets who read
Nietzsche and pout, clawing, man-hating wives and the disturbed
children of divorced parents: Hanif Kureishi's beautifully
written collection of short stories, Midnight All Day, covers
similar ground to his controversial, best-selling novel,
Intimacy.  Indeed, Midnight seems to pick up approximately where
Intimacy left off, but a couple of years down the track. While
each story explores the implosion of a marriage from a different
point of view, often, like the marriage depicted in Intimacy, a
marriage with children, the situations, themes and tone are all
so similar that an almost claustrophobic sense of continuity
asserts itself throughout. It isn't until the final surrealistic
story, 'The Penis', that Kureishi is able to leave his
fascination with the minutiae of sadism behind and relocate
cruelty into a more playful system