SOURCE: “E Pluribus England,” in Los Angeles Times Book Review, June 3, 1990, pp. 3, 10.

In the following review of The Buddha of Suburbia, Eder commends Kureishi's Third World perspective, although finds weakness in the later sections of the novel.

“My name is Karim Amir, and I am an Englishman born and bred, almost.”

It is a start worthy of Dickens; one of those bagpipe sentences whose skirl heralds the book to come, and whose bumpy drone nourishes it as it goes along. The Buddha of Suburbia is London subverted—notice that “almost”—by reality.

There is London as idea: St. Paul’s, sweet Thames, the Changing of the Guard, the National Theater, helmeted bobbies, bowler hats, bespoke tailoring, Big Ben, Bow bells, Pearly Queens and the lot. And there is London of those who came, in one way or another, because of the first London; and who put a mosque...