The Buddha of Suburbia (1990)

Kureishi’s semi-autobiographical novel is in the Western tradition of Voltaire’s Candide, a social comedy of education and growing awareness. Some critical reviews placed the narrator, Karim Amir, in the same category of picaresque hero as protagonists in the books of the black Americans Richard Wright, James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison (all of whom Kureishi read avidly as a teenager), while others saw him in terms of quintessentially English characters such as H.G. Wells’s Mr Polly or Kipps, or Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim. From these seemingly divergent perceptions of reviewers, the reader can begin to consider Kureishi’s novel in terms of a fusion of different types, traditions, or ethnicities.