Rushdie Unleashes 'Fury'

Pico Iyer once commented that the problem with Rushdie is that he is “too damn talented” for his own good. In person, one gets an idea of what he meant: Rushdie brims with a humor and energy that are outshone only by his abundantly apparent fascination and infatuation with the world. His newest novel, Fury is a first step in a new direction for him—shorter, fast-paced and more personal. Still, when Rushdie was in Harvard Square last Thursday reading from the novel for Wordsworth Books, he chose to obscure some of the more personal elements of the book (despite quipping that Fury is “entirely autobiographical—it shouldn’t really be called a novel”). Rushdie read a chapter that required his self-possessed English accent to deliver itself of the cadences of, like, American youth to comic effect. In answer to a question at the reading about the importance of dreams and fantasy in his works, Rushdie spoke about the spilling over of the imagination into the real world, and about the power of the imagined to become reality, sometimes even to replace reality. “Love is an act of the imagination,” he declared, and love is one of the central themes of Fury. The book, according to Rushdie, is about, “a man in flight from his life,” running from the fury he finds within himself, into the arms of redeeming love.

A new book by Salman Rushdie is a cause for celebration, always. He is one of the most immensely talented writers of his generation, and ever since his first, unremarked novel Grimus, he has exercised his talent judiciously and to devastating effect. Although he has been writing for 20 years, this is only his eighth novel, and he has received many of the highest literary honors in the world. His first world-class novel, Midnight’s Children, won the “Booker of Bookers” prize and established his teeming, magical and mythological style, which somehow never lost its sense of intimacy, nor its intense invocation of place. Seldom has a city been so strongly, affectionately and vividly portrayed as the Bombay of Midnight’s Children and the Moor’s Last Sigh. Rushdie has only relatively recently emerged from hiding following the unilateral death warrant that was issued by Imam Khomeini of Iran after the publication of The Satanic Verses, and Fury is Rushdie’s first book since this emergence. What Rushdie calls fury abounds in the minor, miniscule details of everyday life, something Rushdie has been forcibly removed from for more than a decade in hiding.

Fury’s placement in the midst of the vortex of New York is the most immediately obvious change from Rushdie’s previous works. Malik Solanka, the novel’s protagonist, has, like Rushdie, recently relocated to New York after many years’ residence in England. It rapidly becomes clear that Solanka is an unashamed alter-ego to Rushdie; both have been married twice, both attended Cambridge, both were born in Bombay. It is not unreasonable to assume that the fury of the title, a fury with the ever increasing pace and inhumanity of modern life and the pain of loss, has been shared by both men. It is that fury which Solanka has come to New York to flee, to lose himself in the all consuming metropolitan monster. “Eat me, America,” he pleads, but instead America, like the well-gorged monster that it is, starts to play with its food.

The blurbs that accompany the novel describe this it as Rushdie’s first “American” novel. Certainly the novel is preoccupied with America, and the frequent rants about America’s failings further blur the distinction between Solanka and Rushdie: “Who let Charlton Heston out of his cage and then wondered why children were getting killed at school?” The novel brims with Rushdie’s acerbic wit, particularly in his portrayal of an ever-more wealthy and jaded America and its accoutrements. He name drops with alarming frequency, so that at times the page is in danger of being overrun by noisy capital letters as he mixes his fictional characters in with real life divas, brands and stars. Rushdie even creates his own version of Lara Croft, a tough-cookie doll named Little Brain (apparently no relation to the Bear Of), who having been created by Solanka, leaves him in the dirt, engendering some of the fury that now makes Solanka fear what he might do to his own son. His reaction is to create his own WWWeb borne world, in which he casts the characters of his life as cyborg dolls on a drowning planet. The science fiction element is mystifying at times, and its crossover into real life is a leap of imaginative faith that only Rushdie would dare to make.

Despite this, Fury is less teeming and wonderfully overcrowded with characters than many of his other works (perhaps due to the volume’s relative slimness—Rushdie says that he has been “trying to write a short novel for years,” and is proud to have finally succeeded), though there are still several juicy cameos: Schlink, the Jewish U-boat plumber (“Erect, wiry, with Albert Einstein white hair and Bugs Bunny front teeth”), or Beloved Ali the taxi driver (“Hey! American man! You are a godless homosexual rapist of your mother’s pet goat”). Some of these seem to go astray: Perry Pincus, seducer of Eng Lit. celebs and “unashamed sexual butterfly” is presumably a (biting) portrayal of an actual acquaintance of Rushdie’s, though for those of us outside the know, she is fairly superfluous. Although Rushdie’s New York is peopled with minutely observed passersby, victims and perpetrators of infidelity and callousness, all of whom are fuel for Solanka’s and their own pervading fury, at times they are reduced to the simplistic categorisations that Solanka (and I suspect Rushdie) detest in others.

Rushdie has been accused of drawing his female characters in less than three dimension, and it is difficult to dismiss the allegation in this book. The book is dedicated to Rushdie’s new partner, and it largely turns on her fictional alter-ego, Neela, the woman who finally manages to rescue Solanka from his fury. Yet there is something unsatisfying in her portrayal. She is characterized in terms of her beauty, which Rushdie is forced to describe in terms of its (hazardous) effects on her surroundings: arrested traffic, collisions with lamp posts and occasional tears. But the reader is given little reason to sympathize with Solanka’s love for Neela besides her beauty. We are given only the briefest insight into her background, and her passion for her native country’s freedom remains a background consideration until the novel’s final pages. In contrast, a male friend of Solanka’s, who is dead before the book opens, is given an extensive, engaging history, full of the contradictions on which Rushdie thrives.

In the end, the three women in Solanka’s life (clearly Solanka is the heart-throb of a short, middle-aged professorial type, having made his way through three tall, beautiful women in the course of a single summer) become avatars of the Eumenides, the ancient Furies, and Solanka’s struggle with each of them in his creative, familial and romantic lives is the meat of the book. Yet the most poignant, underplayed aspect of the book is Solanka’s relationship with his three-year-old son. It is here that the novel exudes the warmth and heart that is lacking at times in his archly satirical view of New York and the world, and the conclusion is enough to bring a lump to the throat of even the most jaded reader.

Fury is a hugely personal work: a tribute to Rushdie’s newfound love, and to his love for his children, an excoriation of the excesses and breakneck speed of 21st century America, and a story of redemption and ultimate healing. Expatriates in America will find much to sympathize with; Americans may find themselves on the defensive. Not everyone will identify with the fury that Rushdie ascribes to his characters and portrays in their world, and the cynics may have difficulty believing in the redemptive power of love. This is as it should be. All of Rushdie’s greatest works have left loud debates in their epic, myth-ridden wake. Fury, though more personal than epic, deserves to do the same.

Fury

by Salman Rushdie

Random House

272 pp.

$24.95