The Last Word, by Hanif Kureishi

I'm always a sucker for novels about writers and writing. Hanif Kureishi's The Last Word hits this target from a number of angles and poses interesting questions. It is also filled with delightfully developed characters who are all colorful, without becoming caricatures. This gives the book a rich balance of pathos and humor.

A hungry and ambitious young writer, Harry Johnson, is given a commission to write a biography of a towering literary figure, Mamoon Azam. His publisher hopes to revitalize Azam's book sales & reputation. The writer has been a life-long hero to Harry. Of course, Harry opens Pandora's box when he begins his research while living at Mamoon's estate, which creates conflicts for him. Exploitative and thoughtless relationships with women and sexual hijinx are revealed from Azam's first wife's journals and an ex-lover's scathing interviews. Mamoon's deliberately incendiary commentary on all aspects of art and life are already well known, having cost him his academic career. As always, the ambition of the young can be counted on to outweigh admiration.

Mamoon's second wife, Liana, a fiery Italian, would like this biography to polish her husband's career, not paint a picture of a selfish, debauched artist. Harry's character explores the contradictions and conflicts of a biographer, in this case, leavened with his own powerful ambition. Liana quickly recognizes that the biographer has his own agenda of using this book to vault his own career, while she would like it to vault Mamoon's artistic reputation. Meanwhile, Mamoon is distant, insulting, and dismissive of Harry, and will barely grant him a conversation. Their brief, oblique discussions of writing and the artistic process, which Harry must tease out of Mamoon, lay out nuggets about art and life from Kureishi. 

To get this biography written, Harry embarks on a complex dance with all of them. On second thought, one of them might be a caricature: the hard drinking publisher, who pushes Harry & bait-&-switches him. The psychology of these, and other characters, is carefully developed by Kureishi, which gives blood to the heady ideas the book explores. A maid in the household, who has a complex history with Mamoon centered on reading, and a complex relationship with Harry, is a rewarding one. 

In an age of 240 character social media, Kureishi has important things to say about the art of writing. However, the author never takes the topic too seriously, and the novel can be quite funny at times. Highly recommend.