Once More Without Feeling

But they are an indifferent breed; people who never seem to truly inhabit the worlds they live in, and instead step through them as they would hotel rooms. Many are thirtysomething "artists" in love with the narco-chic lifestyle, some rich, some poor, most unemployed, and united only by their sense of frustration. All are men: failed photographers, directors of commercials and television scriptwriters who make their living by cribbing Bergman and Fellini.

Sex is a common denominator. In "D'accord Baby," a man contemplates the moment at which he is about to sleep with the daughter of his wife's lover. "Nightlight" opens with a woman arriving for her regular Wednesday afternoon tryst in a basement apartment. It's a world in which husbands work nights to avoid their wives, then sleep all day to avoid them some more; they cheat on their spouses without a second thought. Says the narrator of one tale: "Infidelities will occur in most relationships."

In between, the men search for salvation, sometimes in literature. In "D'accord Baby," Bill, a screenwriter reads The Brothers Karamazov in bed, underlining the pertinent passages for guidance. "When he considered his ambitions, which he no longer mentioned to anyone -- to travel to Burma while reading Proust . . . he felt a surge of shame as if it was immature and obscene to harbor such hopes: as if in some ways, it was already too late." "Blue, Blue Pictures Of You" features a photographer for whom going down to the pub has virtually taken the place of his job. That is where he reads Remembrance of Things Past, its completion having become his ultimate raison d'�tre.

Imprisoned by domesticity, sensing that children are devouring the artists' lives that they feel they have yet to start living, Kureishi's characters are not prone to long bouts of happiness. In "In A Blue Time," Roy wakes up every morning to feel time rushing past him before it is even light. "The Flies" offers the most graphic expression of the malaise, written as a surreal fable that plays out the demands of modern life as though they were a plague of insects that has infested every nook and cranny of everyone's homes.

"My Son The Fanatic" tells of Parvez, an Asian-British father troubled by his son's strange behavior. He fears it may be caused by drugs or some addiction. Parvez discovers to his horror that the boy is converting to Islam, and begins "kicking his son over" only to have him reply through bleeding lips: "So who's the fanatic now?" Clever and comic in execution, the story stands head and shoulders above the rest.

Kureishi's dialogue crackles and he's brutally deadpan on the absurdities of sex. His description of a man's painful efforts to seduce his wife is a prime example: "He knew she was finally conquered when she stopped watching television." Yet despite the highly accomplished writing, there is a dulling sameness to the tales. Kureishi tells each one with such detachment that you care little for any of the characters, much less their frustrations. It's a world that is black, blue -- and anesthetized right through.