London Calling

Screenwriter and self-publicist Hanif Kureishi pampers his imp of the perverse as if it were a poodle, petting it when it makes mess-mess. He'll even confess to scratching "a speck of dried semen" from his collar while seated at the 1987 Academy Awards. His eagerness to shock is almost endearing. He doesn't try to funnel life; he lets it untidily flow. Responsible for the agitprop pop of My Beautiful Laundrette and Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, Kureishi has now turned his polymorphous-perverse hand to fiction in The Buddha of Suburbia (Viking). Set in seventies London, this busy romp spans the glitter-rock to the punk era, covering a multitude of fashion crimes (turquoise flared trousers! see-through floral shirts! headbands!) and sexual tastes. The unexpected pleasure of the novel is its exceptionally sweet period humor. But like Sammy and Rosie, it becomes an anything-goes grab bag, dragging in hot wax and nipple clamps, drowning in oral-anal overload. A sexual and racial outsider (Pakistani father, English mother), Kureishi is a bourgeois-basher afraid of being branded bourgeois. He uses sexual impudence in The Buddha of Suburbia to prove he's still a politically correct boho. Hanif Kureishi—last of the literary swingers. It's almost poignant, his lonesome position.

JAMES WOLCOTT