[In the following review of Love in a Blue Time, O'Brien commends Kureishi's perspective and observations, but finds shortcomings in his underdeveloped plots and characters.]

Love in a Blue Time is described by its publishers as concerned with “the difficult, serious business of love—and hate”, but it might be more accurate to say that the book’s main subjects are underachievement, distraction and the afterlife of youth. Love, for which sex appears a synonym, is an arena in which these conditions are indulged and suffered. Two brief stories, “We’re Not Jews” and “My Son the Fanatic”, relate personal dilemmas to the larger contexts of race and religion, and achieve a choked, baffled power; but the pull of the book is towards the exhaustion, laziness and panic of private life as Kureishi conceives it for the newly middle-aged members of his preferred class.

His characters are film-makers, script-writers, photographers, artistic wannabes and their variously dissatisfied womenfolk—people who, in their own increasingly vague terms, have not quite made it. Their lives are the Reluctant Reader’s version of the Hampstead novel. One character begins reading Proust, not because it is interesting but because to finish will confer a belated virtue. When another accepts the gift of a framed photograph of Doris Lessing, we learn that “she never finished any book, the satisfaction was too diffuse”. The competition offered by drugs and drink is overwhelming. The here and now is defined by the near-past, the 1980s, a decade “when men and women with energy and ruthlessness but without much ability or persistence excelled”. What counted, thinks Roy, the hero of the title-story, was a kind of mediocre vigour packaged by style magazines:

Knowledge, tradition, decency and the lip-service paid to equality; socialist holiness, talk of “principle”, student clothes, feminist absurdities … such pieties were trampled with a Nietzschean pitilessness. It was galvanizing.

Roy, on the brink of clinching a film deal, is astonished—amusingly, for the reader—to find himself tarred with the same brush by the producer as his wastrel poly-abusing friend, a “failure artist” of a heroic stripe. Shouldn’t Roy’s grasp of the Zeitgeist, and his new and equally unremarkable regret, spare him? But the debts are being called in.

Kureishi’s perspective is long enough for him to see analogies for these late-model attitudes in the 1960s. A photograph of Keith Richards on a basement wall is more than a tribute to a guitarist. It represents a revolt whose only object is self-assertion—not much help for the over-thirties. The treatment of sex, in particular, dispenses with any notion of male enlightenment. Trying with timid cunning to get his wife into bed, Roy has more in common with a character from Kingsley Amis than he might care to think. “At the same time, the smug and selfish Howard” (“television writer and well-known tosspot”) in “With Your Tongue down My Throat” is on to a winner.

You could see the men fleeing when they saw the deep needy well that is Ma crying out to be filled with their love. And this monster kid with green hair glaring at them. Howard’s too selfish and arrogant to be frightened of [Ma’s] demands. He just ignores them.

While there is much to admire in Kureishi’s ability to combine the observation of vanity, stupidity and (less often) desperation with an almost cruel narrative momentum, after a time, the collection of stories threatens to assume the vacant gleam of the lives his characters dream for themselves. The book’s sexual nihilism in particular seems slightly indulgent, and the female characters such as Roy’s wife, Clara, or the desiccated seaside dopehead, Lisa (in “Lately”), are male shorthand for menacing female strength and irritating female weakness, there to make up the numbers in what are always boys’ games.

“Lately” has the legs to become a novella—it has a place, intriguing inhabitants, a mood and a crisis—but it tidies itself away too soon and rather mechanically. It does, however, contain one of the book’s defining exchanges, when Karen, even more feeble than Lisa, remarks: “I’d like to read books. Except I don’t know where to start. People who read too much are snobby, though.” In her way, Karen understands perfectly the effects of her times. Her view demands a response, but she is certainly not going to get it from Lisa.

Kureishi closes the collection with something quite different, the allegorical comedy “The Flies,” a laboured tale of decay and delusion. It seems positioned to sum up the book, but it goes on too long—like the 1980s themselves, some might say. Love in a Blue Time has much to commend it, but it also shows the strain of producing the dreaded third album.