FICTION
Johanna
Thomas-Corr
Good Intentions
by Kasim Ali
4th Estate £14.99 pp352
Last year there were many
conversations in publishing
about the apparent dearth of
young male novelists. Where
was the male equivalent of
Sally Rooney? Was the
shortage of male hotshots an
actual crisis? If so, what had
caused it? Too many women
working in publishing?
Apathetic male readers? Or
a female cultural zeitgeist?
One publisher suggested to
me that readers were bored of
swaggery males proclaiming
their thoughts on sex. What
were needed were “outsiders”
prepared to explore their
“vulnerability”. “There’s a
layer of protection or bravado
that still has to be stripped
away in the way men think
about themselves,” she said.
family are Sudanese. Yasmina
may be ambitious, good-
natured and, like him, from
a hard-working Muslim family,
but Nur is still haunted by
his mother’s disgust
when she saw him
hanging out with a
black girl at school.
We meet Nur on
New Year’s Eve 2018,
when he finally
resolves to tell his
family that he
has been
living with
Yasmina. By
this point he
has hidden
their
relationshiptwo timelines five years apart,
which eventually converge.
Given all the action takes place
between 2014 and 2019, it’s
interesting Ali chooses not to
bring Brexit and the rise of the
far right into his narrative.
Instead it’s a determinedly
intimate story composed of
seemingly humdrum
conversations that gradually
complicate our ideas about
Nur. We learn he has self-
harmed in the past — and it’s
striking just how lonely he
feels, despite two close
friendships and the love of
Yasmina. But while he means
well, Nur is also so “self-
involved”, as a friend puts it,
that he is unable to see
beyond his insecurities. The
split timeline helps the reader
to identify key moments when
a different choice might have
set Nur on another path.
Initially I was frustrated by
Ali’s prose — which can feel
sentimental in its descriptions
of Nur’s angst. But it skilfully
lulls us into thinking of him as
helpless before showing the
dangers of an overdeveloped
persecution complex. On the
surface Good Intentions is a
poignant romance about the
cultural barriers that stand
in the way of two young
people pursuing an honest
relationship. Yet beneath
there is a cautionary tale
about what happens when
you get so caught up in your
own vulnerability that you
forget your responsibility
to others. c“When it does, the writing
will change.”
Kasim Ali’s Good Intentions,
one of the most eagerly
awaited debuts of 2022, looks
very much like a harbinger of
that change. Along with Caleb
Azumah Nelson’s Open Water
and JJ Bola’s The Selfless Act of
Breathing, it’s part of a wave
of novels by young men of
colour exploring race,
romance and mental health
problems with disarming
candour. HarperCollins was so
“dazzled” it paid Ali a six-figure
sum for a two-book deal.
Is it worth the fuss? Yes
— but with some reservations.
Beneath Ali’s overearnest
prose is a rather clever novel
about vulnerability and
victimhood that subtly subverts
the reader’s expectations.
The story centres on Nur,
a 25-year-old online journalist
from Birmingham. He is a nice
guy, a people-pleaser who
suffers from panic attacks,
which only get worse when he
thinks about introducing his
Pakistani parents to his black
girlfriend, Yasmina, whosefor four years, much to
Yasmina’s frustration, because
her parents accepted him
some years ago. Her anger
forces him to confront his
own racism. “It doesn’t
matter if you’re a
minority, you still live
and operate within a
centuries-old racial
hierarchy,” he realises.
This melancholy
story shuttles
betweenThe new male
writer is here
Kasim Ali is part of a fresh literary wave
of men exploring their vulnerabilities
DANIELA ALFIERI. INSET: LYNN HAMMARSTROM-CRAGGSFICTION
Lucy Atkins
Pure Colour by Sheila Heti
Harvill Secker £16.99 pp224
The Canadian Sheila Heti is
best known for her two works
of autofiction: How Should a
Person Be? (2010), which
mixed fiction with real emails
and conversations between
Heti and her artist best friend,
and Motherhood (2018), an
exploration of the decision
not to have a child. Both hit a
millennial nerve; The New
York Times called Heti one of
“the new vanguard” that is
changing the way we read and
write. Her most recent work,
If this is the future of the novel, then we’re all doomed
serialised for New York Times
subscribers, consists of
sentences from her diaries she
has put into a spreadsheet,
and alphabetised. The inner
life reorganised in repetitive,
experiential form is an
interesting concept — but an
irritating read.
Pure Colour stretches
fictional form too, abandoning
novelistic plot and
characterisation in favour of
scenarios and notions, often
surreal, into which the reader
must inject meaning. At its
simplest, though, it is a short
novel about grief. Mira, a
solitary woman in midlife,
has just lost her father. The
questions she asks will be
familiar to anyone who has
experienced recentbereavement. How can he be
gone? Where did he go? What
might be happening to him
now? Could there be
something bigger — God, gods,
the universe — that explains
this? The opening pages set the
tone. God is an artist, stepping
back to assess his flawed work.
He has also split into three
celestial “art critics”: a bird, a
bear and a fish. The planet,
meanwhile, is heating up in
advance of its destruction. And
humans, too, are birds, bears
and fish. Mira’s father is a
“bear”, prioritising close,
loving bonds. Mira is a “bird”,
“interested in beauty, order,
harmony and meaning”.
And Mira’s former lover,
Annie, is a fish, working for the
collective good.What follows is a
swirling, not always rigorous
but occasionally tongue-in-
cheek inquiry into the
human condition, with a
side dose of climate anxiety.
On his death Mira feels her
father’s spirit “ejaculate into
her like it was the entire
universe coming into her
body”. They then inhabit a
tiny leaf together. Their voices
mingle as they swap pseudo-
profundities (“the part of the
world that is pure love... will
still be here after the humans
are gone”). The charitable
interpretation of these leaf
discussions is that our
attempts to know the
unknowable must always be
this: earnest, hypothetical
and perhaps a wee bit silly.There are strengths, of
course. A portrait of isolation
and misunderstandings
emerges as Mira looks back
on her love affair with Annie,
and longs for her. Heti is also
brilliant at nailing down
universal cultural
experiences. Here she is
on being middle-aged: “The
gods strip us [taking] our
parents, our ambitions, our
friendships, our beauty.. .”
Although Pure Colour takes
aim at boring, uptight critics,
the temptation to read it
with a red pen, frowning at
its intellectual vagaries, is
really quite strong. The
publisher calls it “a
contemporary bible”. If this
is the case, then I’m afraid
we’re all doomed. cAll
change
Kasim
Ali13 February 2022 27