Updike on Kureishi

John Updike reviews Hanif Kureishi’s new novel, The Body, in which an older writer has his mind transplanted into the supple, younger body of a Los Angeles man of 25.

Perhaps no novel can do justice to the ancient and still popular concept of leaving our bodies, which are both our enablers and our prisons. Our relation to our bodies lies deeper than circumstance, undemonstrable and irrefutable, along with the sensation that there is a relation, of one thing to something else, though materialist science tells us that out of our bodies we are nothing.

The review was generally positive, though.