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Way Less Than Zero
| Article
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18380 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
9 / 1990 |
2,563 Words |
| Author
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Herb Greer
Herb Greer is an American writer and playwright who lives in
Britain and on the Continent. |
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
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