Dreaming and Scheming: Clooected Non-Fiction, Essays and Teachings
Hanif Kureishi
Faber £8.99, pp270

Hanif Kureishi is a curious writer. Since he decided at the age of 14 to join the profession those he met in his ancestral Pakistan called 'a complicated excuse for idleness, uselessness and general bumming around', much dreaming and scheming has been accomplished, for which he has received much acclaim and much criticism. But Kureishi is perhaps most widely regarded as the British-Asian voice, the race-writer of his generation whose early work inspired artists from the entire cultural spectrum.

Has Kureishi's own race-well run dry? I recall the words of the film-maker Gurinder Chadha, who described Kureishi as 'quite isolated from the Asian side of himself... he's used that side of him without real cultural integrity'.

For such doubters, this collection of his non-fiction should set things straight. In 'The Rainbow Sign', which was first published in 1986 along with the screenplay of My Beautiful Laundrette, Kureishi recounts how, growing up in England, where racists 'weren't discriminating in their racial discrimination', he could understand the motives of 'a black boy who, [having] noticed that burnt skin turned white, jumped into a bath of boiling water'. Then, visiting Pakistan for the first time, Kureishi shook with incomprehension at the notion that he was not considered a foreigner.

But there are other issues too, equally complex, equally political. As a teenager, Kureishi wrote obsessively and sent novels off to publishers from the post-office where his grandmother worked. They soon came back, as he recalls in 'The Boy in the Bedroom', 'the first chapter a little rumpled, with a printed rejection slip pinned to the front'. He had something in common with his father, then, the civil servant who pounded away at his typewriter in the early hours of each day, also only to receive such slips.

Unlike his father, Kureishi achieved success through early plays such as The King and Me and Outskirts, which was produced at the Royal Shakespeare Company's Warehouse Theatre in 1981. Since then, and when he first became involved in the Royal Court Young People's Theatre, Kureishi has run numerous writing courses.

Strange to think of him teaching, considering he was so often in trouble at school. He was even expelled at the end of his first year of philosophy at Lancaster University, before finishing at King's College, London.

But perhaps that's what makes him a great teacher. The collection's title piece is a fascinating account of how Kureishi overcame his 'educational anorexia', how curiosity developed, and how school-teaching could work if only those at the front of the class didn't loathe their pupils.

'What I noticed as a young man at school... was that the well-behaved, the conformist and the compliant were, and would be in life, the most rewarded. What was disturbing was not only that the less bright would go down, but that the dissenters, the 'difficult' pupils... would be excluded from approval. I suppose I saw myself like that.'

Kureishi is still a difficult pupil. Last year, the film Intimacy, on which he collaborated with the French director Patrice Chéreau, produced a stir because of its sexual explicitness. He knew, he wrote at the time of the film's release, that looking at 'how difficult sex is, how terrifying, and what a darkness and obscenity our pleasures can be, might at first shock audiences,' but believed that the shock would fade, 'like the kiss between two boys in My Beautiful Laundrette'.

Kureishi's essays are among his best work. He writes with a clarity and depth that are the mark of a great story-teller. And although one suspects Kureishi does a little more dreaming than scheming, one hopes that he will always feel 'the need to speak and the need to be heard'.