Renovation and Reconstruction

What is fascinating about Hanif Kureishi's The Buddha of Suburbia is its concern with the process of construction, or rather, 're-construction' of the self and of space. Within the pages of the narrative, the representation of houses paralells the representation of their inhabitants, as "Display [is] the game" (75) of national identity. Houses, just like the characters, are distorted and re-constructed through the combination of multiple 'authentic' identities.
Karmin describes the home-renovation process as "the English passion, not for self-improvement or culture or wit, but for DIY, Do It Yourself...the painstaking accumliation of comfort and, with it, status--the concrete display of earned cash." (75) His words hold value, as houses are seen as a microcosum of the cultural negociation between objects as display and the self as performer in a setting that demands authentic truth. We are meant to see contradition in the journalist's description of Eva and Haroon's flat in Westminister as "very feminine in the English manner," (261) not to reaffirm an existing 'Englishiness.' Instead, Kureishi, through the asthetic of 'home' as a symbol of the nation, is highlighting the fluidity of 'space' as it combines "English country-house armchairs and [traditionally colonial] cane tables." (261)
In this book, where the "paradox of paradoxes [is] to be someone else successfully, you must be yourself," (219-20) the paralell between the reconstruction of space and self is fruitful. Just as it is ironic that a cane table is seen as "in the English manner," it is ironic that Tracy calls Karim's Anwar, who's based upon the 'real' Anwar, inauthentic as a "picture of what white people already think." (180) Kureishi is asking why is it possible that we can see the combination of traditionally English and traditionally colonial objects within a space as an asthetic respresentation of authenticity, but not the combined identity of an English boy born of mixed blood.
"Display [is] the game," (75) that operates within The Buddha of Suburbia. Houses show an asthetic fluidity with cultural objects, that paralells the characters, as a demonstration of Kureishi's attempt replace the dominant, Anglo-national narrative with asthetic fluidity. As I closed the book, the houses, along with their inhabitants, forced me to ask, "Is anything ever the objective reproduction of a single cultural truth?" Why can we not see Karim as both an "English country-house armchair and a cane table"?