'Something to Tell' gives novel heft

Life, almost by definition, is change, and change is motion, so it's not surprising that in any culture's literature, immigrants provide the vitality.

In England, where Hanif Kureishi is practically shorthand for cosmopolitan wit, the next phase of the immigrants' journey is taking place, and our man is there to document it with his own lovely and forgiving insights into the imperfect human heart. Kureishi's book takes place in London, a beloved, shambolic character itself -- "city of exiles."

"Something to Tell You" (Scribners, 352 pages, $25) takes place in a strange world where, as one character says, "Thatcherism has destroyed some of the values it supposedly espoused." The scruffy, dashing London of the 1970s and early '80s has given way to a more reflective, if no less anxious realm.

As Jamal, the story's narrator, looks around, he acknowledges the bittersweet fact that the striving outsiders who wanted to be both righteous and hip have become merely urbane and affluent.

It's all summed up quite prettily by the fact that a wealthy gay Muslim entrepreneur named Omar is none other than the passionate young character from "My Beautiful Laundrette." He's reached middle age, and soap has been very good to him.

Jamal is, of all things, a Freudian analyst. As a profession, you can't get more emblematic of comfortable chatter than that -- a person whose professional purpose is to talk about the motivations of people sitting in the same room with them. Of his interest in the human soul, Jamal proclaims, "I'm a gossip trollop, and must have it." Here is a man who takes pleasure in work and pride in his own perversity.

And that is why every Kureishi novel is worth dressing up for. They are like attending a really first-rate party, with great conversation, valid drama, warmth and an element of festive lyricism.

The heft in this story comes, of course, from its secret, the thing that has to be told. Here Kureishi shows a sort of baffling reticence. Making the protagonist an analyst might have been a good device for describing other characters, but the narrator himself has a light grip on the first person. His sin is not as shocking as it should be because he never seems to feel enough about it. He is more concerned with its effect on his present life and the lives of his group of middle-aged peers.

These peers, it must be said, are as emotionally and sexually unruly as they ever were. In Kureishi's cool Britannia, orgies and S&M replace drugs as liberating transgressions. People are forever, ah, bumping into one another in unexpected ways and places. Kureishi's people may have settled into his successful world, but thankfully, they show no sign of settling down.