Hanif Kureishi's The Buddha of Suburbia: Review by Rafey Habib

I have just finished reading Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia in preparation for my graduate class in post-Colonial literature. Of course this book was warmly received by Rushdie and company on account of its comedy, "irreverence" and its "wild" impropriety.
It is indeed a substantial book, dealing with themes of immigration, racism, class, the status of women, marriage, love, the sheer selfishness and cruelty of human relations, and maturing through adolescence and disillusionment; indeed, the true Buddha of Suburbia seems to me to be not Karim’s father Haroon, who strikes the meditative pose for reasons of self-esteem and money, but Karim himself, presented as an uneducated (formally) but surprisingly astute teenager who is unusually reflective on his own and others’ experience, and who, notwithstanding his adolescent hormones and stereotypical ambitions, has the grace and sense to arrive at broader perspectives informed by filial devotion and moral considerations.

I find the book's overt reliance on four letter words a little tiresome; the explicit descriptions of sex might interest an adolescent but soon become wearisome. The humour, improbable though most of it is (as in Changez’s knocking out of Anwar in the street) is effective and had me laughing aloud. But my complaint is the same as that against so many works in this Anglophone vein. Firstly, inasmuch as they deal with religion, they deal with it on an utterly banal level, selecting the worst possible specimens to represent or embody it. Even the relatively abstract near-authorial meditations are superficial as when Kureishi claims that Islam is based on a series of absolute statements – casually inserted into his text, no doubt, but utterly uniformed by anything approaching historical knowledge or accuracy. Again, there is no single character who embodies in any enlightened way any of the older traditions or beliefs or faiths. Everything "colonial" is presented as whacky, irrational, dirty, hypocritical, situated on one ridiculous extreme or another. My complaint here is that if you are writing a novel which claims to detail the real dilemmas of immigrants – cultural, religious, social – then you need to do your homework. You can’t just, on the basis of your own impulsive rejection of elements of your original culture, engage in emotional extrapolations and generalisations based on nothing but hearsay or supposedly common wisdom or on the repertoire of stereotypes that you claim to be undermining and exploring.