SOURCE: A review of The Black Album, in World Literature Today, Vol. 70, No. 2, Spring, 1996, pp. 405-6.

In the following review, King offers a favorable assessment of The Black Album, but finds that it is weakened by Kureishi's tendency toward triteness.

Hanif Kureishi’s latest portrait of post-swinging London is set in 1989, the year of the publication of Rushdie’s Satanic Verses. The liberations of the sixties, the ideologies of the seventies, massive immigration, and Thatcherite economics have resulted in acid raves, slavish followers of any anti-Western slogan, universities in which no one reads, sex without love, disappointed feminists, increasing unemployment, angry minorities, angry white men, the collapse of liberal culture—you name it and it is likely to be here. This is an update of Waugh’s Decline and Fall, but without understatement or consistent irony. It is also “The Second Coming,” but as warning. Things have fallen...