The Nothing

The narrator of Whitbread Prize–winner Kureishi’s caustic latest (after The Last Word) is a dirty old man named Waldo. He’s an angry, impotent, but highly successful filmmaker who suspects his younger wife, Zee, is having an affair with their friend Eddie, a flaneur who’s been hanging around claiming to chronicle Waldo’s glittering past. Waldo, still obsessed by sex but plagued with declining health, spends most of his days trapped in a wheelchair in his London apartment, cooking up schemes to catch Zee and Eddie, destroy the latter, and hold on to the former. He schemes with his actress friend Anita, but, after she helps him gather damning evidence about Eddie, he’s pretty sure she’s turned against him as well. There is not a decent soul or breath of fresh air within these pages; Kureishi rises fiendishly to the challenge of creating disagreeable characters, and true to form indulges in bald, unrelenting talk of sex acts and sex organs. There’s a bit of tormented Hamlet in Waldo, but little philosophy or meat in this wicked little revenge tale. [em](Jan.) [/em]