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A Review by Brooke Allen

Salman Rushdie's newest novel is surprisingly slim, in contrast to his usual flatulent, overweight tomes. If we didn't know better, we might be tempted to think that he is narrowing his sights — that the literary machismo of recent efforts such as The Ground Beneath Her Feet (1999), The Moor's Last Sigh (1995), and The Satanic Verses (1988) has mellowed into a more controlled style of fiction. The first few chapters of Fury would seem to confirm this impression: Rushdie, the cosmopolitan Asian, has momentarily strayed onto the alien turf of Roth, Bellow, and Updike.

The narrator is fifty-five-year-old Malik Solanka, an Indian professor of philosophy turned high-concept doll maker and, eventually, Web designer. Propelled by mysterious feelings of rage against his beloved wife and son, he has fled his comfortable London life to seek refuge in New York. The dandyish Solanka — part Mr. Sammler and part Humbert Humbert, with a dose of Moses Herzog's objectless disgruntlement thrown in — observes the imperial excess of boomtown Manhattan with precision: "The city boiled with money...New restaurants opened every hour. Stores, dealerships, galleries struggled to satisfy the skyrocketing demand for ever more recherchι produce: limited-edition olive oils, three-hundred-dollar corkscrews, customized Humvees...featherlight shawls made from the chin-fluff of extinct mountain goats...America insulted the rest of the planet."

Rushdie lives, as the saying goes, in interesting times, and he has all the mental equipment necessary for skewering contemporary vanities and fears. But the book's promising beginning is soon drowned out by more typically Rushdian overkill: the cacophony of voices, plots, opinions, allegory, puns, magic realism, multicultural mythology, historical clues, and pop-culture references he has never attempted to edit. He cannot trust the story he is telling to hold its own. The point, for him, is not the tale he tells but the sound of his own raucous and frequently hysterical voice raised in its telling.

Rushdie's theme is fury: "Life is fury...Fury — sexual, Oedipal, political, magical, brutal — drives us to our finest heights and coarsest depths." He has chosen an appropriate setting in the overheated, overcharged city of New York, which anesthetizes its fury with material excess while various remote Balkan and Third World countries explode into localized furies of their own. But Rushdie can never resist trying to ennoble his fiction with mythic pretensions, and here what might have been a strong story — even a rather honest one, given the surface similarities between Rushdie and his hero — is altered to fit his chosen myth: the story of the Eumenides, the Furies. These ladies are given earthly shape in the persons of Malik's perfect but (let's face it) used-up and middle-aged wife, Eleanor, and his two New York babes, the Serbian Mila and the Indian Neela. (Get it? Malik, Mila, Neela — that old Rushdian linguistic playfulness, by now a little shopworn.)

Neela in particular is pure wet dream, and the pudgy Solanka's possession of her is one of the sillier episodes in this mostly very silly book. Although Rushdie poses as a sharp political realist, and occasionally — as in Midnight's Children (1980) and Shame (1983) — even fulfills that role, when it comes to the personal he is the complete romantic: the experience of fifty-four years and three marriages notwithstanding, he still seems to think that somewhere out there is a perfect woman for every man, perfectly beautiful, whose love will set him free. "Furia could be ecstasy, too, and Neela's love was the philosopher's stone that made possible the transmuting alchemy." (This, by the way, is all very fine for the famous, hip Solanka and his famous, hip creator, who don't have to rely on their beaux yeux, but most sedentary fifty-something intellectuals find it rather more difficult to lure nubile beauties into their beds.)

In a craven bow to modern bathos, Rushdie finally exposes the source of his hero's angst: Solanka turns out — surprise, surprise! — to have been a victim of childhood sexual abuse. This revelation, and Solanka's "working through" of his problems, bring the novel to an unconvincing denouement. In the end Fury is not so much a literary exploration of the forms and varieties of furia as it is a pandering to contemporary mores disguised as a critique of them, and a graceless rant against incipient old age.

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