THE BUDDHA OF SUBURBIA
Hanif Kureishi
New York: Viking, 1990, 1989
288 pp., $ 18.95
The act of writing a novel is a ritual - a pretense that someone is going to read or listen to what you have to say. Like all rituals, this one can etiolate; its sense and meaning can drain out into a kind of verbal make-work because the question of whether or not anyone is listening (or reading) becomes irrelevant, except in terms of sales. The content may be picturesque and colorful, even sporadically amusing, but it is also shallow and flat, its images and final effect are gaudy but inconsequential, like the painted decorations on carnival and fun-fair facades.
The Buddha of Suburbia is just such a novel. It is a frustrating book because the material is promising. In the current cant term used in British education, it is multicultural, that is, drawn from the life and experience of the domestically reared Anglo-Indian class to which the author belongs. Karim, son of an eccentric (Muslin than Hindu) Indian immigrant and working-class Englishwoman, is brought up in the suburbs of South London. When the father, who is called Haroon, leaves home to live with his new English mistress in West Kensington, Karim goes along. Haroon's mistress is Eva Kay, who has lost one breast to cancer and burns with ambition to get on in the arts world. She exploits her theatrical acquaintances to become a successful interior decorator, helped by Karim's English Uncle Ted, a builder and former football hooligan who, weaned away from suburban dullness by Haroon's rather cut-rate Yoga philosophy, also escapes into London.
Thanks to his meteque good looks plus Eva's contacts, Karim drifts into success in the theater. After a certain amount of humiliation, plus somewhat routine and aleatory sex, well larded with social psuedery, his career climaxes with a plum part in a television soap opera. That is that.
Karim's simple story is woven through a number of other much more complicated lives: There is his father's shopkeeper friend Anwar, an unregenerate Muslim who goes on a hunger strike to blackmail his rebellious daughter, Jamila, into an arranged marriage; when the husband, Changez, arrives from Bombay, he proves to be fat, ugly, and deformed. Jamila - who has been sleeping with Karim - refuses to touch her new husband. But after Changez catches them in bed, Jamila and Karim become friends instead of lovers, and Jamila is radicalized, moving in time to an English commune in a large house. Changez follows her, becoming a kind of servant-cum-mascot; when Jamila has a child by her new lover Simon, Changez happily cares for it as if it were his own.
Eva's son Charlie is Karim's best friend and brief lover (Karim swings both ways). Charlie, a mediocre but physically beautiful musician, joins a punk band and becomes an international pop star; he ends up as an adoptive New Yorker, well into making money and sadomasochist sex of a particularly ugly kind, involving bondage, a leather hood, hot candle wax, and a cold candle, lubricated. Meanwhile Karim has found success in a multicultural play directed by Matthew Pyke; Matthew proves to be a nasty piece of work, who first introduces Karim to the “creative life,” summons him to a humiliating AC/DC orgy, and then steals his great love (Eleanor, a neurotic redheaded
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