Hanif Kureishi has written plays and movies — notably the screenplay for My Beautiful Laundrette , which was nominated for an Oscar. But he's also won awards for his short stories and novels. The British author's new book is a slender volume called The Nothing . Considering that there is very little sex in the book, it is a dirty book, about a nasty, dirty old man. The protagonist Waldo is in his 80s — he's "very withered" and "barely mobile," Kureishi says — when he suspects his younger wife Zee may be having an affair with one of his best friends. "I wanted to write a character who was a bit older than me, who had lived through the great experiments of the '60s, you know, involved with the anti-war movement and drugs and new sexuality and so on," Kureishi says, from his home in London. "And I wondered what would have happened to such an old man now. What would he be doing now? What would he think now? Would he be out of date? And what would his attitude be to the fact that he was
↧