SOURCE: “Literature vs. Piety on the Streets of London,” in Chicago Tribune Books, October 22, 1995, p. 5.

In the following review, Fields offers tempered praise for The Black Album, which she considers less well-written than The Buddha of Suburbia.

Hanif Kureishi has said of his new novel, The Black Album, that it is the first expression, in fiction, of support for Salman Rushdie, whose career as a writer is literally a matter of life and death. Kureishi has set his novel in 1989, the year of the fatwa, the death sentence imposed on Rushdie by the Iranian theocracy as his punishment for having written what it considers—in the face of all contrary literate opinion—a blasphemous book: The Satanic Verses.

The Satanic Verses is never named as the book that provides the pivot for the turning point in this narrative and in the development of the novel’s chief character...