SOURCE: A review of The Buddha of Suburbia, in World Literature Today, Vol. 65, No. 2, Spring, 1991, p. 370.

In the following mixed review, Rahman finds The Buddha of Suburbia “somewhat tedious to read,” but commends the author's realistic portrayal of the characters' “blighted lives.”

Hanif Kureishi is well known for such compassionate plays on race relations as Birds of Passage (1983) and My Beautiful Laundrette (1986). The Buddha of Suburbia is his first novel, and though it features Asians living in England, it does not focus upon race relations except in passing. The main theme now is the confusion of values and loyalties in the mind of the protagonist, who is an adolescent boy when the novel begins. The boy, Karim Amir, who is also the narrator, is the product of a mixed marriage. The father is a Pakistani and the mother an English woman. The novel opens with the father moving...