In categorizing the protagonist Karim Amir’s family as lower-middle class, Felski notes father Haroon’s occupation as a civil servant and mother Margaret’s position as a sales assistant (26). Linking Kureishi’s novel to Orwell’s negative depictions of suburbia, Felski notes that “the petit bourgeois structures of feeling mapped out” described by Kureishi “are remarkably similar to those described by Orwell” (37). It is a world of identical small semidetached houses stretching into infinity” (35). Rita Felski describes Orwell’s early fiction as “devoted to a ruthlessly detailed portrayal of the English lower middle class of the 1930s … The same landscape reappears in novel after novel, enfolding and stifling its inhabitants in the death grip of mingy decency. Orwell’s disparaging attitude towards suburbia is part of a long tradition within British literature that originates in the nineteenth century, if not earlier (Webster 2). A line of semi-detached torture chambers” (Qtd. In Coming up for Air (1939), George Orwell describes a suburban road as “a prison with cells in a row. Suburbia quickly came to be identified in the public consciousness with the working class, and, more commonly, the lower-middle class.

As the suburbs grew and multiplied, British writers used suburbia as both a setting and a subject, usually depicting it negatively. It is fitting that Kureishi examines London suburbia, since it was in London that the first modern suburbs developed during the eighteenth century (Ball 20). Although Kureishi is unquestionably a significant writer and in many respects an innovator, The Buddha of Suburbia continues a lengthy tradition of British literary engagement with suburbia and contains many traditional and stereotypical representations. In Simon Frith’s analysis of Kureishi’s semi-autobiographical debut novel The Buddha of Suburbia (1990), he declares that it is “the most incisive suburban fiction of recent times” (271). In the preface to her recent interview with Hanif Kureishi, Susie Thomas claims that his body of work (which includes drama, screenplays, novels, short fiction and essays) is “the most wide-ranging and significant” produced in England during the past quarter century, and goes so far as to claim that Kureishi “has irrevocably altered the English self-image” (3).

The buddha of suburbia novel