[In the following review of The Buddha of Suburbia, Jiménez finds shortcomings in the novel's empty hedonism and unconvincing resolution.]

Karim Amir is squeezing a favorite penis (not his own) to Pink Floyd’s “Ummagumma.” He’s 17. In order to squeeze so, he’s forgone a dreaded chess club meeting and gone out with his father, Haroon, for a karmic night around town. Karim is no Janis Ian inventing lovers on the phone. As he will tell you, he’s from suburbia, South London, and going somewhere—to the real London, the asterisk, the inevitable tour of duty, and then, who knows? He’ll follow his dreams with an unquenchable sense of erection. Karim, you know, is the master of ocular desires, just as his Pop is the Buddha of Suburbia, addicted to yoga and Lu Po and Lao Tzu and lusty nights.

Hanif Kureishi (yes, My Beautiful Laundrette and Sammy and Rosie Get Laid) has crowded into less than 300 pages what might be called a novel but is rather a constant, furious, streaming 1970s circle-jerk that takes in Pakistanis, Indians, Englishmen and Americans as well. The initial cast of characters includes Charlie (Karim’s squeezing partner and a rock-superstar wannabe) and Charlie’s mother, Eva Kay, who doubles as Haroon’s lover. Both couples make love in the first seventeen pages—Haroon and Eva on a public bench, Karim and Charlie in a bed—and then father and son go back home, complicitous, to poor old Mum, Margaret, who won’t sleep with a man “stinking of sick and puking all night.”

That’s South London in this novel, a place where flesh is king and Buddha: Everybody yields and everybody knows. The day after the opening trysts, Karim finds his mother’s sketchbook, a kind of minimalist diary where everything is summarily recorded. She knows. She even knows about Eva’s most intimate secret (her one-breasted chest) and has detachedly inked her view of it for posterity, along with her husband’s tragic, paunchy figure:

Standing next to him, slightly taller, was Eva, also naked, complete with one large breast. They were holding hands like frightened children, and faced us without vanity or embellishment, as if to say: This is all that we are, these are our bodies. They looked like John Lennon and Yoko Ono. How could Mum be so objective?

But objectivity, it seems, leads to dead-end streets in South London, where only the pragmatic and the adulterous prevail. By the end of part one, “In the Suburbs,” the marriage has crumbled, Haroon and Eva continue with their carnal rampage and mystical entertaining (nights spent discussing the secrets of Confucianism, Sufism, all isms, with friends) and poor Margaret is left to her soap-opera self. “You both left me,” she pines to Karim as he prepares to follow Charlie to London.

Part two, “In the City,” picks up three years later, when Karim is 20 and planted in London, with Dad and Eva and a few desires: “parties where girls and boys you didn’t know took you upstairs and fucked you … all the drugs you could use. You see, I didn’t ask much of life; this was the extent of my longing. But at least my goals were clear and I knew what I wanted.” One-track mind? Well, the problem with the novel is not Karim’s unbearable fascination with phallic phantoms but the fact that he’s been listening to Cat Stevens too much. Although musical references pop up throughout the book—everything from Nat King Cole to the Rolling Stones to Pete Townshend—the only song that really comes to one’s mind is Stevens’s syrupy “Father and Son”: Look at me, I am old but I’m happy. Karim’s politics are every bit as suburban as his father’s, he just punks it out differently. When Haroon—a k a Daddio, God or Harry—ends his marriage, wanders around and stays up late, Karim takes notes. He’ll surely repeat the feat, make it better, less boring. And he won’t wait for his middle-age crisis. Karim becomes the artsy sexual samurai his world seems to be waiting for. Ever eager, against his better judgment, he discovers the cheap thrills of possession (“I was being kissed a lot lately: I needed the affection, I can tell you,” he tells us); and in awe of Charlie’s musical triumphs with his Mustn’t Grumble band, Karim tries his hand at acting, which is what he has done all his life, more or less. Then the novel becomes a tad more philosophical, if you will. Karim has all the reasons for his likes and dislikes but, alas, can’t quite thread them together. Actually, he admits he’s fallen in love with Charlie because, like his father, he insists on standing apart. “I liked the power that they had and the attention they received. I liked the way people admired and indulged them.” By then, he’s a lost case.

The heightened sense of wanderlust that drowns Karim is reminiscent of—if not totally akin to—that of Sammy and Rosie, the successful, oversexed protagonists of the bittersweet Kureishi film that bears their names. But here, as opposed to the author’s screenplay heroes, Karim, Charlie and the gang seem to be transacting in silence against their worst primary fear: boredom. Nothing, not even society’s decay and possible demise, is more atrocious to these characters than a moment without excitement.

This is where Kureishi parts ways with his literary influences—particularly the Salman Rushdie of Shame and Midnight’s Children—whose social concerns he has abandoned in search of a more yuppified style. Kureishi’s characters do not seduce with ideas, as does Saleem Sinai of Midnight’s Children; they seduce with seduction, crassly and harshly, as they fiercely explore the empty possibilities of the dominant leisure class. When they think, they wander; when they don’t, they lust.

Our redefined Oedipus doesn’t really do much. Kureishi has given Karim such a narrow, albeit real, scope of interests that the only thing he can do is follow his travails and quote his friends: Louise Lawrence the onetime masseuse (who discovered socialism “in a forest of pricks and pond of semen,” realizing that “nothing human was alien to me”), Richard (who “talked about wanting to fuck only black men”) and Eleanor (who “worked with a woman performance artist who persuaded her to extract the texts of poems—‘Cows’ teeth like snowdrops bite the garlic grass’—from her vagina before reading them”). Naturally, Karim is taken by Eleanor for a while. He needs her exoticism, still believes he’s nothing without a hot, adventuresome, experienced nobody by his side.

Aimlessness and glands rule the novel so powerfully that near the end, when Kureishi strives to make sense of the whole indulgent mess, the only possible recourse is the tried-and-true device of a sojourn abroad, return ticket included. Karim the actor has finally made it to New York—he’d said he would—where he meets Charlie the superstar again, and they move together to the East Village. Charlie has turned into a joyless, materialistic pig; Karim has fits of depression and self-hatred. He’s nothing but Successful Charlie’s mental yardstick: “I was a full-length mirror, but a mirror that could remember.” He does—the good times, the illusions, the corners he turned in search of Charlie, the heartbreak and the accumulation of events both senseless and sensual. What’s left? Predictably, the return to London, Pop’s marriage proposal to Eva, a new beginning. The end.

Funny, but Kureishi is an intelligent writer—all too intelligent—to end the book with such nirvanistic complacency after a nonstop wandering hell. Something somewhere tells us that there’s a sequel to the novel, which has already been optioned off for a movie. Then again, we could join with Karim in singing The Smiths’ ode to nothingness: Sixteen, clumsy and shy / I went to London and. … Or perhaps we should remember Eva’s lament at the beginning of the novel: “The cruellest thing you can do to Kerouac is reread him at 38.” I felt a bit cruel reading Kureishi at 30.