This affiliation is explicitly proclaimed by Kureishi in his preface to the anthology of pop writing, The Faber Book of Pop (1995), when he reiterates Tom Wolfe’s regret that the 'tremendous social upheavals of the post-war world' – had not yet found their Balzac or their Dickens (Kureishi, 1995, xvii).ĢThis nostalgia for the Western canon seems paradoxical on the part of a second generation immigrant and exuberant baby-boomer whom one may readily associate with the centrifugal forces which have contributed to pushing Britain away from the historical pre-eminence established during the Victorian period.

Right from the beginning, the novel thus announces the contemporaneity of its themes, based on racial and cultural hybridity, while proclaiming its affiliation to the conflict between individual aspirations and social pressures which constitutes one of the topoi of the traditional realist novel. 1In the opening lines of Hanif Kureishi’s novel The Buddha of Suburbia (1990), the central protagonist, a young Anglo-Pakistani pop fan, proclaims his desire to exchange his mediocre lower-middle class existence in the London suburbs for a life of adventure: 'I was ready for anything'.

The buddha in suburbia