Free at last from the chains of marriage. So why the long face?

Midnight All Day by Hanif Kureishi, Faber, £9.99, pp217

Narcissistic and cruel middle-aged men, young nymphets who read Nietzsche and pout, clawing, man-hating wives and the disturbed children of divorced parents: Hanif Kureishi's beautifully written collection of short stories, Midnight All Day, covers similar ground to his controversial, best-selling novel, Intimacy.

Indeed, Midnight seems to pick up approximately where Intimacy left off, but a couple of years down the track. While each story explores the implosion of a marriage from a different point of view, often, like the marriage depicted in Intimacy, a marriage with children, the situations, themes and tone are all so similar that an almost claustrophobic sense of continuity asserts itself throughout. It isn't until the final surrealistic story, 'The Penis', that Kureishi is able to leave his fascination with the minutiae of sadism behind and relocate cruelty into a more playful system of pure pleasure and artifice. While 'The Penis' ensures Midnight ends on a positive note, for those not fascinated by domestic savagery, this is a case of too little fun, too late.

'Four Blue Chairs', 'Girl', 'Morning in the Bowl of Night' and the title story, 'Midnight All Day', all explore relationships between men who've left their wives for their younger lovers. None is written from the women's point of view (only one story in Midnight is, but she's an ex-wife). In 'The Umbrella', the male narrator resorts to violence. His ex-wife won't lend him an umbrella, so he forces entry into her house. Her solid punch on his chin seems a justified response to his assault.

Only the urban myth, 'The Penis', breaks from the pattern, relocating pain into a surrealistic, dream-like world. Attempting to explain to his wife why he was home so late the previous night, Doug discovers a living penis and scrotum in his pocket. He takes it to a cosmetic surgeon who, for a monumental sum, sews his penis back on and Doug lives happily ever after, if hugely in debt. While it's tempting to read Doug as a metaphor for Kureishi's other male narrators - like Doug, they're castrated, their wives make them flaccid; they'll do anything to get their erections back - Doug is more convincing as a kind of radical other. Unlike them, Doug is able to solve the problems in his life by the most superficial means and doesn't need to probe Hamlet-like depths for answers: he does what he has to and then gets on with living.

Enslaved to their own pleasure, Kureishi's characters are far more convincing speaking of cruelty than love. People speak of the violence of separation, but what of the delight? What could be more refreshing than never having to sleep in the same bed as that rebarbative body and hear those familiar complaints? Surely such a moment of deliverance would be like losing one's virginity or becoming a millionaire.

Kureishi is acclaimed for his 'depiction of a lost generation of men'. Indeed, his portraits of men who came of age in an era that was radically transformed by feminism are convincing. Midnight's anti-heroes' combination of feminine trappings, the desire to nurture, or to talk things through, with a truly brutal form of private masculinity, will only nastily entertain. Midnight All Day does, however, leave a lasting, if bitter, impression, because much of it, sadly, rings true.