Fury
By Salman Rushdie. Random House, 259 pages, $24.95.

UNFLINCHING: it's Rushdie's brilliant rendering of America's zeitgeist that makes Fury so compelling.

As its title suggests, Salman Rushdie’s Fury flies off the page in a rush, opening with a tour de force description of New York in the summer of 2000: " The city boiled with money. . . . New restaurants opened every hour. Stores, dealerships, galleries struggled to satisfy the skyrocketing demand for ever more recherché produce: limited-edition olive oils, three-hundred-dollar corkscrews, customized Humvees . . . escort services featuring contortionists and twins . . . featherlight shawls made from the chin-fluff of extinct mountain goats. "

It’s difficult to read this passage and others in Fury without an unsettling sense of the disjunction between the New York of Before and After September 11, particularly as the city is presented from the perspective of Malik Solanka, a malcontent ex-academic who dissects America’s love of excess and artifice with devastating accuracy. The well-chosen details that give Fury its bite are a hallmark of the sharp-eyed outsider; born in Bombay, Rushdie moved to Manhattan from London two years ago, not long after Islamic fundamentalists lifted the 1989 fatwa imposed against him by Iranian clerics for perceived insults to Islam in The Satanic Verses.

The creator of " Little Brain, " a wildly successful " philosophy doll, " Malik flees London after he finds himself in a trance and holding a knife over his sleeping wife and child. As he settles into a Manhattan sublet, his only goal is to erase this horrifying bug from his hard drive. What better place to do so, he reasons, than a country where the ability to remake oneself is a national obsession?

New York, unfortunately, doesn’t allow him the fresh start he seeks. Soon he’s confronted by Mila Milo, a young woman who has modeled her red-haired, green-eyed appearance on Little Brain’s. Once Malik’s pride and joy, Little Brain the doll gradually metamorphoses into the sort of living, breathing, pop-culture industry he despises, her image repeated and imitated ad nauseam. " Day by day she became a creature of the entertainment microverse, her music videos . . . out-raunching Madonna’s, her appearances at premieres out-Hurleying every starlet who ever trod the red carpet in a dangerous frock. " Even so, Malik is unable to turn down the fat royalty checks his creation brings in, and this hypocrisy feeds his anger and bitterness.

As Malik becomes involved with Mila, he frets over recurring blank spots in his consciousness and the disturbing news that a serial killer is bludgeoning young, high-society women with a slab of concrete. New York " the great World-City " is breaking down all around him. " How had he ever persuaded himself that this money-mad burg would rescue him . . . this Gotham in which Jokers and Penguins were running riot with no Batman (or even Robin) to frustrate their schemes . . . where 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, and in which human souls had wandered so separately for so long that they barely remembered how to touch . . . ? "

Fury moves along nicely on the energy of Rushdie’s stylish pyrotechnics and a building sense of tension. Is Malik the serial killer? Will he return to his wife and child? Then Neela Mahendra, a beautiful political activist from the tiny South Seas island nation of Lilliput-Blefuscu, commandeers Solanka’s affections, but not before Mila has inspired him to create the Puppet Kings Web site, a world populated with characters who mirror his life in New York.

As the narrative comes to a head, its momentum stalls. Malik travels halfway around the world to join Neela on Lilliput-Blefuscu, where she’s gone to film a documentary of the revolution. Here, too, he’s confronted with the blurring of fiction and reality when he finds the country modeling itself after Rijk, the Puppet King’s society — even the movement’s leader wears the mask of Akasz Kronos, the character inspired by Malik himself. " Its [Lilliput-Blefuscu’s] streets were his biography, patrolled by figments of his imagination and altered versions of people he had known. . . . The masks of his life circled him sternly, judging him. . . . He had wished to be a good man . . . but the truth was he hadn’t been able to hack it. "

If aspects of Fury’s wrap-up feel somewhat arbitrary, its final chapter is an oddly moving surprise. At emotional rock bottom, forced to recognize the indelible nature of the past, Malik tentatively moves toward the future. Such a journey is certainly a worthy vehicle for a novel. Yet it’s Rushdie’s brilliant rendering of America’s zeitgeist, not our involvement with Malik, that makes Fury so compelling. Searing and intelligent, it offers an unflinching picture of the world before " everything changed " and makes us question what is really so different.

Issue Date: November 8-15, 2001

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