Discoveries

GABRIEL’S GIFT, By Hanif Kureishi, Scribner: 223 pp., $23

Hanif Kureishi’s fans love his plays and stories and novels about family, about the relationships between fathers and sons and husbands and wives. His sweet spot, the thing that brings out his finest writing, seems to be the father-son relationship. This is where Kureishi’s honesty and humor and social conscience and sense of the generations of history blend and fly out. He is good at telling the story of daily life (coffee, sleep, staircases and laundry) against a variety of backdrops: still life with racism, still life with poverty, still life with religious fanaticism. Still life in London, if such a thing is possible.

Gabriel is 15. He loves his sneakered, guitar-playing father, who moves out on the novel’s opening morning. “My favorite part of that man is his back,” Gabriel’s mother yells after the retreating van. The boy draws pictures of objects that become real as he draws them. This is one of his gifts. Another is extraordinary insight into adults: “He had noticed ... that there were different styles of madness for men and women, fathers and mothers. The women became obsessive, excessively nervous, afraid and self-hating, fluttering and blinking with damaged inner electricity. The men blunted themselves with alcohol and cursed, blamed and hit out.”

Yet another gift comes from legendary rock star Lester Jones (a kind of Mick Jagger figure), who once performed with Gabriel’s father. When father and son visit Jones, he draws a picture for Gabriel that turns out to be incredibly valuable. But Gabriel’s real gift is optimism. He believes in his father and in his own future, in his own talent and ability to work hard. In Gabriel, Kureishi has created the kind of character who turns life into art.

THE DEVIL’S LARDER, By Jim Crace, Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 166 pp., $20.

“Double, double toil and trouble.” These 60 short pieces of fiction about food are an incantatory stew of dead shellfish, ash, mottled skin, overripe melons and the pips of crab apples. Most of the foods are eaten outside, amid leaves and dirt and moss, beside rivers, in cold air.

A widow eats her cremated husband, sprinkling a few of his ashes on her meals each day. A father eats the pasta from his daughter’s mouth and vice versa. Boys pop ticks from a goat’s ear. The rich details are tasty and smelly and glinting with late afternoon light. There are rucksacks and gawping feeders, pungent flesh and acrid brine. “In this part of the world, where manac beans grow as commonly and readily as moss, coddled by the salty coastal air and the nipping temperatures of night, no one with any money would add them to their stews....” The Earth is teeming with dubious foods, the food of nightmares and unexplained childhood memories. “The devil wanders with his straw sack at night through the meadows and woods behind the town.” It’s Edgar Allan Poe dancing with M.F.K. Fisher (“I like to test the flavors of deceit ... bittersweet and treacherous, the kiss of lovers from opposing villages”); Edward Gorey and Julia Child (“If Anna was allergic to aubergines she hadn’t noticed it”).

POWER POLITICS, By Arundhati Roy, South End Press: 132 pp., $40, $12 paper.

Arundhati Roy is known at home in India and abroad, she notes with some amusement, as a “‘writer-activist’ (like a sofa-bed)”. Three political essays written after “The God of Small Things” (which won the Booker Prize) earned her this title and no end of grief from the government, including a criminal charge of “corrupting public morality.” These essays are about India’s nuclear tests, big dams and the privatization of infrastructure like water and electricity. She is called an activist because she “takes sides.” “I use everything in my power,” she admits, “to flagrantly solicit support for my position.” After her well-publicized essay on the Sardar Sarovar Dam on the Narmada River, India’s Supreme Court debated holding her in contempt citing among other crimes, “vulgar debunking” and “vicious stultification.” Judges referred to Roy as “that woman.” “I began to think of myself as the hooker who won the Booker.” The contempt of court law, Roy pleads, dangerously interferes with a writer’s imagination and creativity. It is harassment. But it hasn’t stopped her. In this short essay, Roy makes clear that her opposition to the dams (and the plight of the 56 million people displaced by big dams in the last 50 years) will not change, no matter how much pressure her government puts on her. Roy is clearly a writer who loves her country. “Corporatizing India,” she writes proudly, “is like trying to impose an iron grid on a heaving ocean and forcing it to behave.... I’d say the only thing worth globalizing is dissent. It’s India’s best export.”