The Body

Botox, boob jobs, and butt implants? These seem the stuff of child's play in Hanif Kureishi's The Body, as an aging writer has his brain transplanted into a muscular young body that could give a Dark Knight-era Christian Bale a run for his money. Kureishi's intellectual in go-go dancer's clothing (or, well, body) finds youth both alluringly and unhappily incongruous with his maturing mind. Sure, a tight derriere is a real pleasure, yet so is the comfort of observing the parallels of one's aging body with that of one's wife. Through tender observations of the narrator's saggy-bottomed, wrinkly wife, readers are invited to indulge in the book as a parable, and ultimately, the aptly named Adam learns the dangers of beauty too, when another body snatcher, a Newbody, begins hunting him for his handsome shell. Brisk British self-deprecating humor and wry jabs at the vanity of the young and beautiful keep the novella from becoming mind-numbingly made-for-television, and Kureishi is at his masterful best when the disparities between the sometimes-deluded narrator and reality provide comic relief to a story that otherwise might merely creep the line between eye-rolling and disgust.