E Pluribus England : THE BUDDHA OF SUBURBIA <i> by Hanif Kureishi (Viking: $18.95; 283 pp.) </i>

“My name is Karim Amir, and I am an Englishman born and bred, almost.”

It is a start worthy of Dickens; one of those bagpipe sentences whose skirl heralds the book to come, and whose bumpy drone nourishes it as it goes along. “The Buddha of Suburbia” is London subverted--notice that “almost”--by reality.

There is London as idea: St. Paul’s, sweet Thames, the Changing of the Guard, the National Theater, helmeted bobbies, bowler hats, bespoke tailoring, Big Ben, Bow bells, Pearly Queens and the lot. And there is London of those who came, in one way or another, because of the first London; and who put a mosque at Regents Park; kohl, dall, funny smells and funny accents in Southall; and Caribbean markets and unemployed anger in Brixton.

Hanif Kureishi, author of the film “My Beautiful Laundrette,” again shows us England and her Third World, this time in a novel. He writes of Indian shopkeepers, punk groupies with spiked green hair, grandmothers in saris and their granddaughters hooked on Germaine Greer, soccer hoodlums, lords’ sons in Italian shoes and no socks, and avant-garde art snobs with private incomes. He weaves together a London that is terminally fragmented; he writes about traditional Londoners and the people they take account of only when they take the wrong bus.

The weaving is done through the wonderfully observant and comically desperate voice of Karim, son of an Indian father and an Anglo mother. They live in a dingy south London suburb and float between worlds. But it is Kureishi’s point that the worlds themselves are floating.

Dad, as Karim calls him, is a minor government employee, and miserable at it. But it is not his real life. He is a flowery Bombay cock-of-the-walk: warm, impulsive and flirtatious. When Karim was 3 and 4, Dad would take him to tearooms and dispatch him to ladies at nearby tables with the message: “My daddy wants to give you a kiss.” Later, he draws on his heritage to practice yoga and give courses in Eastern mysticism.

Dad is a big hit with the local middle class, particularly with Eva, who is brassy, arty and shrewd, and steals Dad from his family. Karim is torn. He goes with his father to Eva’s seances in turquoise flared trousers, see-through shirt, scarlet vest with gold stitching, high-heeled blue boots and a headband--a mixture of Indian and hip--but he weeps at the news that Dad is leaving. Dad weeps too, and covers him with kisses. The weeping and kissing are done in public; tropical disturbances at a south London bus stop. Dad is trying to go to Eva’s; he has to ask Karim for the right bus.

Karim knows all the buses. He is solidly in with the matted-hair rock ‘n’ roll set at his school; he listens to pop stars on his radio, and he has the right moves. But he floats too. He is bisexual--in a novel about blurred identity, even sex is blurred--and makes love both to Charlie, Eva’s beautiful, rock-musician son, and to Helen, whose father has a hairy back and hates “blacks.”

He also makes regular love with Jamila, his best friend. She has done drugs and sex since puberty; she is utterly liberated and politically aware; her idols are Greer, Malcolm X and Kate Millett. But her father, Anwar, is on a hunger strike because she refuses to marry a husband whom his family in Bombay has picked out for her.

Floating worlds. The Indians are trying to cope with being English. The English have lost any real identity of their own. Dad, the suburban Buddha, is a big hit; he even converts Karim’s chauvinist Uncle Ted, whose hobby is football rioting.

Eva will move to central London and get in with the art crowd. She will take Dad with her; his guru work will go out of demand, but he will remain as cheerfully full of himself as ever. Jamila will marry Changez, her bespoke husband, but she will not sleep with him.

Karim will get a theater job playing Mowgli in “The Jungle Book.” He will move up to a fashionable avant-garde group, working up a character based on his Indian relatives. It will feel like exploitation, but it will lead to a high-paying TV job; and by that time, having been exploited, sexually and otherwise, by his up-market English associates, he won’t much care.

Kureishi’s story turns thin and cartoonish in its later sections, when Karim is dealing head-on with the snobby London set. Other English writers, from Waugh on, have told us everything possible about its hollowness and decay. Kureishi’s pages on the decadent New York entertainment scene--Charlie has become a punk-rock star--are equally thin and brittle. But the portrait of Karim’s inner struggle, and that of his family and friends, is richly comic and quite a bit more.

There is Changez, for example, Jamila’s imported husband. We first see him as “the man walking towards England.” He is a one-man foreign country right in the middle of Heathrow Airport: tubby, bald, carrying two rotting suitcases and full of illusions about a fine marriage and a fine English future. They will be punctured, one by one.

Changez is hopeless at working; he falls asleep in his father-in-law’s store. Jamila treats him with the utmost severity, making him sleep on the couch while she sits in the bedroom doing her political studies. Eventually she moves them both to a commune, where she takes lovers of both sexes.

Changez yearns continually, but with immense dignity. With one deformed arm and no looks, he is lordly nonetheless. He is a god exiled into hard times, but he never doubts himself. And he delivers a splendid speech of outrage in Jamila’s anarchist, vegetarian, free-love (but not for him) commune:

“All you here in this house, you good types, talk of the prejudice against this Yid and that black burglar bastard, this Paki and that poor woman. . . . But what about ugly bastards? What about us? What about our rights to be kissed?”

In his account of his countrymen making their way in England, Kureishi tells us more about England, perhaps, than he does when he attempts a direct portrait. It is in the lovely deflections of his highly colored, life-asserting Indians that we see the social hollows and pallors of their hosts. Karim’s south London schoolmates, and the aimless husbands and wives who flock to Dad’s Buddha sessions, are as floating and unplaced in Thatcherite England as the immigrants are.

In an odd way, “The Buddha of Suburbia” is a counterpart to Tom Wolfe’s “Bonfire of the Vanities.” Both books show the Western city pressed upon by a non-white Third World. Wolfe’s book, clever but cold, shows us simply what it is like to be pressed. Kureishi’s witty and exhilarating novel--despite its awkward and disappointing second half--shows us what it is like to be that Third World.

We see the people in the streets, subways and little shops from whom we tend to avert our eyes, or at least our sympathy. In averting them, we become less visible to ourselves. We could use a few Kureishis over here.