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).
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