FURY
By Salman Rushdie

One of the more bizarre ideas associated with the umbrella label "postmodernism" is that put forward by the French critic Jean Baudrillard. According to Baudrillard, reality has been replaced by simulation in contemporary life and the only real America left is Disneyland.

This is Salman Rushdie’s world. Manhattan, the setting of his latest novel, is the simulacrum. The real world is only a reflection, at best, of fiction ("the unreal world that ruled the real one"). Activists from the Swiftian island of Lilliput-Blefuscu parade in the streets, while a mysterious gang of killers dresses up like characters from - you guessed it - Disneyland. "Here was macabre proof of fiction’s ability to cross that supposedly impermeable frontier," we are told: "Disney World was trespassing in New York." The result is a cartoon city, one where "characters from books or videos or songs actually felt more solidly real than did most living people."

At least part of this has to be attributed to the fact that the main character in the novel is an artist/celebrity. Malik Solanka is a Bombay-born academic turned puppeteer. Thanks to his creation of a doll named Little Brain he is now fabulously rich and famous. His personal life, however, is a wreck. Filled with a vague but uncontrollable "fury" directed at all points outward he has abandoned his wife and child in England to live the life of a goldfish in New York’s shiny bowl. There he meets a couple of young beauties who, of course, just can’t help falling head over heels for him.

It is the fate of a celebrity to always be part of a show. And if you feel like the cameras are always on, then it’s natural to make analogies between reality and fiction, life and the movies. In Fury everything that happens is like a movie, or reminds someone of a movie. Medication makes the world seem like something seen through the translucent shower curtain in Psycho. A cartoon girlfriend pretends to be Jessica Rabbit. Solanka’s fury threatens to burst out of his stomach like one of the monsters in Aliens. A knife-wielding bad guy gets so drawn into a discussion of which movie villain he is supposed to be representing that he forgets what he is doing with a knife.

But then, in Baudrillard country the movies are reality. "In the minds of many adults," Solanka opines, "the experience on offer in the movie theaters now felt more real than what was available in the world outside."

Yes, this book repeats itself.

Rushdie is a bad writer, and it’s clear from Fury that he isn’t getting any better. The dialogue is a joke, failing to capture any of the rhythm of speech. (Obscenity in particular is not handled at all well, leading to the conclusion that Rushdie, in Mark Twain’s formulation, only knows how to swear like a girl.) The barrage of stupid puns and overuse of mythology are soon annoying. The cartoonish racism is downright insulting.

But overshadowing all of this is Malik Solanka himself.

The problem with semi-autobiographical heroes (Rushdie left a wife and child in England and ended up living in Manhattan with a model, as Solanka does) is that they tend to be such self-serving creations. Malik Solanka is the uber-Rushdie: a world-famous celebrity and Midas-touch entrepreneur the babes can’t resist, natch; but also a tortured artist pursued by inner demons still capable of casting a cold intellectual eye on the treacherous shallows of American culture.

It doesn’t wash. The critic is a poseur. Rushdie’s ignorance of the Internet is even more embarrassing than Don DeLillo’s. And as a self-important connoisseur of trash the former Cambridge professor of the history of philosophy falls on his face. In the movie The Cell Jennifer Lopez doesn’t get miniaturized and injected into the brain of a serial killer, she uses a virtual reality device. Solanka complains that "nobody" will realize the movie is a rip-off of Fantastic Voyage, but it isn’t.

Solanka’s take on America isn’t a rant so much as a whine. Those who consider fiction to be more important than reality are bound to be disappointed in life, and in his constant wallowing in self-pity Rushdie’s avatar is no exception. Indeed, he even pities his self-pity! "His own unpredictable temper," he decides, "was a thing of pathetic insignificance, the indulgence, perhaps, of a privileged individual with too much self-interest. And too much time on his hands."

Exactly. Fury is too big an emotion for such a little creature, especially if Rushdie wants us to understand fury in the classical sense he tries to invoke. Instead of the fury that "drives us to our finest heights and coarsest depths," revealing the "human animal in us, the exalted, transcendent, self-destructive, untrammeled lord of creation," it is only a petty, self-pitying bitterness. The origin of fury, Solanka concludes, lies in "life’s accumulating disappointments," the spoiled whine "is this all there is? What, this is it? This is it?"

Yes it is, a mature novelist, one writing about the real real world, might say. Now deal with it.

Notes:
Review first published October 20, 2001. 

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