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The Nobu Novel
A Review by James Wood

Fury, a novel that exhausts negative superlatives, that is likely to make even its most charitable readers furious, is a flailing apologia. It tells the story of an Indian professor, Malik Solanka, who has recently left his English wife of fifteen years and their three-year-old son, and flown from London to Manhattan. Professor Solanka, who has made a lot of money by inventing and marketing a puppet, comes to America desperate to erase his past, to start over again, and to bury the guilt he feels not only about his separation but about a moment of "fury" in which he had held a knife over his wife's sleeping form and imagined stabbing her.

But in Manhattan — the boiling, zany, money-fattened Manhattan of the end of the millennium — Professor Solanka finds not peace but only a universal fury, and he obsessively wanders the streets, a tormented flaneur, angrily observing the madness of contemporary American life, inflamed by "the everywhereness of life, by its bloody-minded refusal to back off, by the sheer goddamn unbearable head-bursting volume of the third millennium." Solanka has an affair with a furious Serbian woman called Mila Milo (shortened from Milosevic — you see, even her name is furious!), and then with a beautiful Indian woman called Neela, "by some distance the most beautiful Indian woman — the most beautiful woman — he had ever seen." But Neela is furious in her way too — she is a political activist — and after some wild adventures Solanka loses her to that fury. The novel ends with Solanka returning to London and taking a suite at Claridge's, where he "lay wide-eyed and rigid in his comfortable bed, listening to the noises of distant fury." The next day he spies pitifully on his estranged wife and son as they walk on Hampstead Heath.

The novel appears to be an apologia in part because it is nimbused by a dirty cloud of reality. Many readers will know that Rushdie himself has suffered an actual separation from an English wife and child, and has embarked on a new life in America, and has a beautiful Indian girlfriend whom he met at the launch party of Talk magazine. Quite apart from these meshings of subject and theme, the novel seems to want us to read it as a species of feverish diary. Fury might as well be time-stamped, and it might itself be entitled Talk: most of it is relentlessly set in the New York of last year, and records, as if offering the pages of a calendar, the city's large and small events.

Thus we read about the Puerto Rican Day parade that ended in rapes, about Courtney Love. There are knowing references to Tom Ford of Gucci, Meg Ryan and Dennis Quaid, Monica Lewinsky, Naomi Campbell, Mark Wahlberg, Saul and Gayfryd Steinberg, Sophie Dahl, Lara Croft, Dave Eggers, Charlie Rose, Tommy Hilfiger, and so on. This is a novel that contains the sentence: "Thanks to Buffy on TV, vampires were hot." And this:

The season's hit movie portrayed the decadence of Caesar Joaquin Phoenix's imperial Rome, in which honor and dignity, not to mention life-and-death actions and distractions, were to be found only in the computer-regenerated illusion of the great gladiatorial arena.... In New York too, there were circuses as well as bread: a musical about lovable lions, a bike race on Fifth, Springsteen at the Garden with a song about the forty-one police gunshots that killed Amadou Diallo, the police union's threat to boycott the Boss's concert, Hillary vs. Rudy, a cardinal's funeral, a movie about lovable dinosaurs, the motorcades of two largely interchangeable presidential candidates (Gush, Bore), Hillary vs. Rick ... a cartoon about lovable British chickens, and even a literary festival....

Flourishing its glamorous congestion, Fury is immediately obsolete; its trivia tattoo has already faded. The decision to soften the task of fictional representation, to relax mimesis to this level of muscleless gossip, this bare recording of social facts, is obviously disastrous. For a start, it abolishes form: why should Rushdie's list ever end? There will always be a few more movies to include, and next weekend's parties. And when a writer is recording minor events only because they occurred, it is hard not to flatter them, hard not to be grateful to them for the small tenacity of their occurrence. Thus in the passage above, and throughout the novel, although Solanka (and, one imagines, Rushdie) seems to want to complain about all this ephemera and noise, and even to resist it, the actual tone of the citations is something closer to complacency, a clammy and hospitable irony. (One notes the very witty reference to the New Yorker literary festival at which Rushdie himself appeared.)

Of course, all this weightless volume of reference is supposed to be part of "the fury" — the white noise to Solanka's black noise. We are often asked to picture Solanka lying on his bed with his hands around his ears, trying to banish the noise of Manhattan, "a city of half-truths and echoes that somehow dominates the earth." It is hard not to catch the tone of confession once again, the sound of a request for absolution: if a general fury surrounds Solanka, then perhaps his own sharp fury is less culpable, because he has merely been dipped, like the novel, in the madness of the times. And why should we blame Solanka for leaving his wife if he is inflamed, poor fellow, by nothing less than the instability of the fin-de-siecle? Perhaps the problem with the abandoned Mrs. Solanka — who, we are told, wanted more children, unlike her "furious" husband — was that she was just not furious enough? Too "English," and not sufficiently "American"?

It may seem unfair to make Rushdie merge with Solanka, but the novel's own corruptions force the identity. There is, throughout the book, a grievous uncertainty about whose voice is speaking. On the one hand, we are introduced to a supposedly fastidious European voyeur, who appreciates "the old European subtleties": "old-world, dandyish, cane-twirling little Solly Solanka in straw Panama hat and cream linen suit went by on his afternoon walk." Solanka is essentially an Indian version of Mr. Sammler; he even has the Jewish nickname Solly. As in Bellow, descriptions and criticisms are generally prefaced or followed by an almost programmatic "Professor Solanka thought." So we get: "America insulted the rest of the world, thought Malik Solanka in his oldfashioned way," or: "Solanka marveled, once again, at the human capacity for automorphosis," and so on.

On the other hand, what does Solanka choose to see, and how does he represent it? What is Mr. Solanka's Planet? Here the novel disastrously wavers. It seems, in fact, that "old-world" Solanka is enormously interested in, and utterly au fait with, the celebrity houses in the Hamptons, the fancy new Manhattan restaurants Nobu and Pastis, Ellen DeGeneres, Tony Soprano, and Jennifer Lopez. At one moment Solanka recalls that his first wife was probably somewhere in Manhattan: "Sara Lear was probably right here in town, he suddenly thought. She would be in her late fifties now, a big shot with a booming portfolio, the secret booking numbers for Pastis and Nobu, and a weekend place south of the highway in, ah, Amagansett." Now, one sees why Sara Lear might know the secret numbers to Nobu and Pastis, but why would "old-world" Professor Solanka know them? At another moment Solanka reflects that although he feels he may be going mad, he will be "avoiding head doctors. The gangster Tony Soprano might be going to a shrink, but fuck him, he was fictional. Professor Solanka had resolved to face the demon himself." At another moment he sees posters for The Cell:

There were posters everywhere for The Cell, the new Jennifer Lopez movie. In it, Lopez was miniaturized and injected into the brain of a serial killer. It sounded like a remake of Fantastic Voyage, starring Raquel Welch, but so what? Nobody remembered the original. Everything's a copy, an echo of the past, thought Professor Solanka. A song for Jennifer: We're living in a retro world and I'm a retrograde girl.

So Solanka, who seems to think that the corrective possession of deep historical memory will consist in familiarity with a Raquel Welch movie, also knows his Madonna.

And then there is the language in which Solanka makes his observations. For an Anglicized Indian professor, a former fellow of King's College, Cambridge (Rushdie's own former college) who has never before lived in America, Solanka's diction has gone peculiarly native. Solanka uses "gotten" and not "got," and thinks of one man as "his pal, his best buddy," and recalls getting "jiggy beside a big-assed Puerto Rican girl," and talks of "shrinks" and "head-doctors," of "industry mavens," of "goddamn" noise and "the cheesiest daytime soap." When he complains to Neela about American power, he jitters explosively like someone trapped in a Philip Roth novel: "But, Solanka wanted to say, rising to the bait, what's wrong is wrong, and because of the immense goddamn power of America, the immense fucking seduction of America." One way of manufacturing a proper American "fury," clearly, is with the frequent oiling of the word "goddamn."

Is Solanka thinking or is Rushdie thinking? This is not a small complaint; not just a pedantic fussing about "point of view." For this instability of voice, this anarchy of borrowed languages, infiltrates and infects the fabric of the storytelling. A cartoonish and inauthentic voice produces a cartoonish and inauthentic reality. Consider the following fluorescences: "this glowing six-foot Cruella De Vil fashion plate of a mother"; "erect, wiry, with Albert Einstein white hair and Bugs Bunny front teeth"; "the owner-manager, a Raul Julia lookalike"; "she had become the Maya Angelou of the doll world"; "a petite Southern belle . . . who was a dead ringer for the cartoon sexpot Betty Boop"; "tall and skinny, with a sexy John Travolta quiff"; "a Stockard Channing of the near-at-hand" (a particularly unfortunate echo of Augie March's self-characterization as a "Columbus of those near-at-hand").

All these vulgarities, these hazy swipes at vivacity, are characters (so-called) in Fury, and all are seen in these terms by Professor Solanka. Striving to be vivid, this writing produces only something smaller than life, because distanced and mediated by anterior images: when a man is described as having Bugs Bunny teeth, you see Bugs Bunny, you do not see the man. Or perhaps you do not even see Bugs Bunny — who, frankly, would be a relief in place of the actual owner of the Einstein hair and the Bugs Bunny teeth, an octogenarian plumber named Joseph Schlink, who arrives one day to mend Professor Solanka's lavatory. Schlink speaks, writes Rushdie, "with the unimproved accent of the transplanted German Jew," and commits this monologue:

My name amuses you? So laugh. The chentleman, Mr. Simon, calls me Kitchen Schlink, to his Mrs. Ada I'm also Bathroom Schlink, let zem call me Schlink the Bismarck, it von't bother me, it's a free country, but in my business I haff no use for humor. In Latin, humor is a dampness from the eye. This is to quote Heinrich Böll, Nobel Prize nineteen hundred seventy-two. In his line of vork he alleges it's helpful, but in my job it leads to mistakes. No damp eyes on me, eh?, and no chokes in my tool bag. Chust I like to do the vork prompt, receive payment also prompt, you follow me here. Like the shvartzer says in the movie, show me the money. After a war spent plugging leaks on a Nazi U-boat, you think I can't fix up your little doofus here?

This cartoonishness, which has been Rushdie's weakness throughout his career, and which has been lucky enough over the years to be flattered by the term "magical realism," only proves that he is incapable of writing realistically — and thus oddly confirms the prestige of realism, confirms its difficulty, its hard challenge, its true rigor.

It needs to be said again and again, since Rushdie's style of exuberance has been so influential, that such vividness is not vivacious, that in fact it encodes a fear of true vivacity, a kind of awkwardness or embarrassment in the face of the lifelike. There are certain kinds of critics who equate excess with nourishment, like someone who believes that only a fat baby is a healthy one. Such readers are doubtless likely to announce that Rushdie's new novel is "full of wonders, among them a learned riff on Raquel Welch and a plumber who looks like Einstein and chats easily about Heinrich Böll!" (This kind of critic always has a pen that whittles exclamation points!) It sometimes seems that this is now the only kind of reading performed in America. But true vivacity — which is not necessarily the same as mere lifelikeness — has no need to shout. It goes by, in Yeats's words, with white footfall.

In general, Rushdie's observations pound a wilderness between incredibility and banality. Certainly the form of the novel is not suited to his screaming color-range. Like a good number of contemporary novels, Fury makes use of the idea of an overloaded flâneur — a man goes out to record, with all the writer's fineness of observation on his side, what the writer would have seen were the writer able to speak autobiographically, like the "I" of a Romantic poem.

The flâneur, of course, was born in Romantic poetry — the Wordsworth of The Prelude quite as much as Baudelaire — before being born again in modern prose in Benjamin, and in The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, and even in Nausea and Mrs. Dalloway. To this tradition, the contemporary novel adds the plausible idea that such a flâneur is not merely the writer's agent, but is in some ways a too-porous scout who has lost his way. The old maps have gone, and the new signs are unreadable; and so the modern flâneur is driven mad by the indecipherable abundance of contemporary signification. Bellow's Herzog stands on a sidewalk grate in Manhattan, and feels the roughened surface "like Braille under his feet." The world pours in illegibly: it is Braille for those who cannot read it, the wrong answers to the wrong questions. Rushdie would like to add Professor Solanka, furiously reeling from fury, from "the everywhereness of life," to this literary inheritance.

Yet this is a difficult form to sustain, because it is managed and propelled largely by writerly tact and brilliance. In ordinary hands, where such brilliance is missing, the flâneur novel becomes merely a chance for the writer to have his say about some matters that occupy him; the novel becomes a series of ambulatory essays of variable interest and quality. Fury is a failure of this kind, because Rushdie lacks the literary fineness that is needed to keep descriptive analysis interesting. The prose is, without exception, flat and unoriginal, so that the details that Solanka observes lack any flame. And the analysis is itself often startlingly banal. Here is Solanka-Rushdie on TV ads:

the commercials soothed America's pain, its head pain, its gas pain, its heartache, its loneliness, the pain of babyhood and old age, of being a parent and of being a child, the pain of manhood and women's pain, the pain of success and that of failure, the good pain of the athlete and the bad pain of the guilty, the anguish of loneliness and of ignorance, the needle-sharp torment of the cities and the dull, mad ache of the empty plains, the pain of wanting without knowing what was wanted, the agony of the howling void within each watching, semiconscious self. No wonder advertising was popular. It made things better. It showed you the road. It wasn't part of the problem. It solved things.

Apart from suffering the inconvenient disadvantage of being completely untrue, this passage is just a piece of "writing."

Worse, the flâneur novel, if weakened to pointlessness by limited literary talents, is entirely nullified by the magical-realist or cartoonish impulse. If the flâneur is not an empiricist or an idealist, but only a candy-colored animator, he might as well not go out onto the streets at all. Rushdie might reply that, far from failing at realism, he does not even attempt it, because he does not believe in it — hence the "magic" of his rollicking, unrealistic exuberance. To which the proper retort is that representation is both a realism and a magic. Fiction is itself chimerical, the manufacturing of inventions; and the effect of adding magic to chimera is not a kind of doubling of the chimerical, not a mere raising of the fictional temperature, but merely a mirage-like false heat, resulting in total disappearance. For this reason, Schlink the plumber, the octogenarian European Jew, literally disappears into his "vividness" before our eyes. His complexity, his social history, his secret wants and sadnesses, his actual comedy: all this is abolished by excess, as great noise becomes finally inaudible.

The irresponsibility of this kind of "lively" writing becomes more apparent the nearer it aspires to conventional realism. For the nearer it reaches the real, the greater the surface of the real that it desecrates. Solanka sees a "middle-aged African-American woman sitting on the next bench," eating her way through "a long egg salad hero, advertising her enjoyment of every mouthful with loud mms and uh-huhs." The unwitting condescension of this vignette, the garishness of its minstrelsy — these blacks, the passage seems to scream, for them even a sandwich merits a gospel chorus! — is optimistically balanced by the wised-up correctness of the terminology: the lady may carry on like a crazy mama, but she is still an "African-American woman." Of course.

Perhaps Rushdie, in comparing his characters to film actors and the like, is making a point about the society of spectacle, about the ineradicably mediated nature of the contemporary American world? Look, even Professor Solanka cannot escape this corruption: he sees Jennifer Lopez and immediately thinks of Madonna! But to poison a whole book is a very lengthy way of making a point about a single modern germ. Besides, Solanka supposedly dislikes all this "fury"; it is he who condemns this "retro age," "this age of simulacra and counterfeits."

Alas, the contradictions of Rushdie's book (we are told also that the terrifically knowing Solanka apparently felt "alienated" by "the anonymous faces in magazines, faces that all Americans somehow recognized at once"), the unlikely vulgarities of Professor Solanka, taken alongside his equally incredible American argot, are so distorting that they abolish him as a character, and leave him only as a figment of Rushdie's painful confessional urge. Alas, Fury does not seem to present Mr. Solanka's Planet so much as Mr. Rushdie's Planet, which is all secret numbers for Nobu and fancy houses in the Hamptons. One sees now why Solanka-Rushdie reverently calls New York "a city of half-truths and echoes that somehow dominates the earth." It is because Solanka's idea of Manhattan is no deeper than the idea of the man who is "a Raul Julia lookalike." Indeed, the Manhattan of Fury is a city of half-truths precisely because Solanka-Rushdie peoples it with cartoons: Schlink is one of those walking half-truths.

And not just Manhattan. America, too, is seen cartoonishly in this book. Solanka, you recall, has come to America "to be devoured.... He had come to America as so many before him, to receive the benison of being Ellis Islanded, of starting over. Give me a name, America, make of me a Buzz or Chip or Spike. Bathe me in amnesia and clothe me in your powerful unknowing. Enlist me in your J. Crew and hand me my mouse ears!" And thirty pages later Solanka returns to this theme:

He had flown to the land of self-creation .. the country whose paradigmatic modern fiction was the story of a man who remade himself, his past, his present, his shirts, even his name for love . . . his old self must somehow be canceled, put away for good. And if he failed, then he failed, but one did not contemplate what lay beyond failure while one was still trying to succeed. After all, Jay Gatsby, the highest bouncer of them all, failed too in the end, but lived out, before he crashed, that brilliant, brittle, gold-hatted, exemplary life.

There is luxurious condescension in this trite prayerfulness. Perhaps Rushdie is unaware of the disdain that menaces his apparently laudatory words. The idea of America as a place of "amnesia" and "unknowing" represents a perfect coincidence of old-fashioned European dismissal and new-fashioned postmodern naivete: in the older vision, America is disapprovingly seen as the country with no real history; in the postmodern vision, America is approvingly seen as the country with no real history, as one enormous inauthentic Disneyland, handing out Mickey Mouse ears to its grinning immigrants.

"Give me a name, America, make of me a Buzz or Chip or Spike": Rushdie seems not to realize that this might be a land of real names rather than a playground of floating signifiers, that some actual Chips and Spikes live in America, that amazingly enough they have histories, even American histories, and do not stride forgetfully through clouds of "unknowing." Why, they might even know enough to not know what Nobu is! And Rushdie, solemnly deciding that America's founding modern myth is Gatsby's self-creation, seems unaware that there was the slightest tincture of irony or moral censure in Fitzgerald's novel. It is as if Solanka were saying to himself: Gatsby did it, so I do it, too. But the force of Fitzgerald's story was that Gatsby's life, however "brilliant," was a failure not because it crashed (Rushdie's apparently consequentialist standpoint), but because Gatsby's ambition itself was corrupt.

Given these moral tremors, which speak brokenly throughout the novel, it seems preposterous and surprising when Solanka-Rushdie begins to plume himself up as a moralist towards the end of the book, excoriating America's corruption by materialism. Suddenly Solanka has forsaken fascination with fashion, and is deciding the world, and ringing the metaphysical emergency-bell: "All around him, the American self was reconceiving itself in mechanical terms, but was everywhere running out of control.... For the real problem was damage not to the machine but to the desirous heart, and the language of the heart was being lost." (The upholstered syntax, the placement of the word "everywhere" — "everywhere running out" — denotes an antique moral seriousness and hauteur.)

Dazzled by the lovely and ardent Neela, Solanka appears to discover a conscience. He reflects that "behind the facade of this age of gold, this time of plenty, the contradictions and impoverishment of the Western human individual, or let's say the human self in America, were deepening and widening." All of a sudden Manhattan becomes "this Metropolis ... wealth was mistaken for riches and the joy of possession for happiness, where people lived such polished lives that the great rough truths of raw existence had been rubbed and buffed away":

O Dream-America, was civilization's quest to end in obesity and trivia, at Roy Rogers and Planet Hollywood, in USA Today and on E! . . . or even at the unattainable tables of Jean-Georges Vongerichten and Alain Ducasse? Yes, it had seduced him, America; yes, its brilliance aroused him, and its vast potency too, and he was compromised by this seduction. What he opposed in it he must also attack in himself. It made him want what it promised and eternally withheld.

But it is too late to be coming on like Dreiser in Sister Carrie, flaying the corruptions of "The Walled City." This is supposedly a moral castigation, and perhaps a form of confession, but is it not really cousin to the earlier condescension? For Rushdie's view of corrupted America is as vulgar as his vision of uncorrupted America. The uncorrupted "devourer," the savior and eraser of the self, was Mickey Mouse; the corrupted civilization, against which he supposedly pits himself, is Roy Rogers, and possibly Alain Ducasse. Take your pick. But Fury speaks the language of corruption anyway, and so it has no rock, no Dreiserian sidewalk or Bellovian altitude, from which to launch this ethical armada. It has apparently been corrupted by the very corruption that it decries. It is Rushdie-Solanka, after all, who seems to have his head filled with Tony Soprano and J-Lo and Alain Ducasse. Perhaps the corruption here lies in knowing enough about such tiny figures to accuse them of being corrupters in the first place? Who will corrupt the corrupters? And so Rushdie manages the remarkable feat of being simultaneously Euro-condescending and American-debased.

It is one thing to write an allegory or an apologia about how America has compromised one's soul, but it is quite another to publish a novel that so emphatically re-enacts that compromise.

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