The Budda of Suburbia: 8/10

I woke up at 4am this morning. I couldn't go back to sleep. So I read the last 80 pages of THE BUDDA OF SUBURBIA. Three hours' later, I finished. And I felt good.

I bought THE BUDDA OF SUBURBIA about a month ago. I heard the author, Hanif Kureishi, give a reading of it at Book Slam, and he was hilarious.

"I told my kids I was going to a disco this evening," he recalled.
"A disco? Why?"
"For a book-reading," he'd replied.
"You want us to go with you to a disco to listen to you reading from a book?"
"Yes."
"Fuck off, grandad."
"Well at least I'm not a virgin," he retorted, to howls of laughter.

His writing displays the same wit, but also a much deeper understanding of human nature, and what it means to be a British/Indian/Muslim living in London. For me, he's like an Islamic Howard Jacobson: painfully funny, bitter, and a turn of phrase that keeps you glued to the page.

In THE BUDDA OF SUBURBIA, his Whitbread award-winning first novel, the coming (or should that be cumming?) of age of Karim takes centre stage.

Amoral, on-heat and disoriented by his dysfunctional, Ebony-and-Ivory parents, he finds himself through fucking, and being fucked. Karim can't empathise, and it's hard to empathise with him. But then, just observing his cheek, his complete lack of moral clarity and his humour is satisfying enough. As are the author's observations of a decaying 1970s London, where no-one works, the middle-classes pretend to care and people's moral centre of gravity is out to tea.