Love in a blue time

'Love in a Blue Time' reveals the essence of a generation - from the liberating irreverence of the seventies to the dilemmas and disillusionments of the nineties. In 'With Your Tongue Down My Throat,' a Pakistani girl's visit to London foments a revolution in her conservative home. In 'My Son the Fanatic,' a father, suspicious of his son's rejection of his once-sacred adolescent possessions, makes a discovery about the new values of the younger generation. And throughout, men and women, once carefree, careless, and usually stoned, grapple with responsibility, fidelity, and other complications of adult life in the middle-class nineties. Driven by love, but distracted by sex, drugs, and the sheer compulsion of argument, these characters are consummate voices of their time. And Kureishi, naughty, provocative, yet intensely sympathetic, finds the heart of their struggle.