As Rushdie is a man whose life so often reads much like fiction, we might be forgiven for assuming "Fury" to be rooted directly in some of his personal experiences, for considering it less on its literary merits (which are dubious) than as a furious tirade on the 'state of our state,' the lonely cry of a countryless man only lately come to a land where identity is a catch phrase of the most puerile sort and only foreigners chronicle its growth/decline.
So maybe Rushdie can be pardoned for writing a novel that reads like a mix between a clumsy political tract and tourist diary, a misstep more dire than his previously overblown "Ground Beneath Her Feet"; but there is no excuse for the oppressive, artificial prose we encounter in almost every paragraph. The theme of perpetual exile, always woven so skillfully and unobtrusively through Rushdie's earlier work, here becomes sodden and labored. Gone are the delicate, amusing sketches we're used to; there is little humor and absolutely no magic to lighten what, towards the end, becomes a cautionary, pedantic tale of simulation vs. simulacra, masks vs. makeup, dolls vs. puppets.
The fury of the title, in its most primary manifestation, is the one which haunts the hero, Solly, a retired professor and creator of the wildly popular doll "Little Brain." Quickly, though not quickly enough, we find he has left his wife and three-year-old son in England because of this unidentifiable fury that alternates between paranoia, tiresome anxiety attacks, existential crises and truly frightening murderous rages.
Solanka wanders the streets in his wide-brimmed Panama hat, hiding from New York's infernal noise. "He was never out of earshot of a siren," Rushdie writes, "an alarm, a large vehicle's reverse-gear bleeps, the beat of some unbearable music."
Solly also casts his roving, yet celibate, eye over the available women. And maybe, just maybe, he kills several high society girls with a lump of concrete-and then scalps them.
This is an interesting set-up for a story that, had Rushdie tackled it with his full narratorial strength, could have probed the depths of human cruelty more effectively than Bret Easton Ellis's "American Psycho." But Rushdie is in trouble from the beginning; Solly's opening monologue on the rampant consumerism of his adopted city reads more like a stilted, dated, embittered rant we've heard too many times from too many unsatisfied, conservative politicians than one of Rushdie's typically polished outbursts. Solly's venting on everything from customized Humvees to the latest anti-virus software is no doubt sincere, but awfully predictable-a sin his previous fictions avoided.
Rushdie even manages to work in the falling value of the NASDAQ index and Amazon stock on the second page, and from there it is a long way down through a hell of IPOs, startups, eerily familiar hacker figures, Amadou Diallo, Hillary and Rudy, Elián González and "Gladiator."
The irony is heavy-handed, especially for a writer of Rushdie's talents. Does Rushdie honestly believe he is the first to note America's obsession with commercials, with commercialization? Why, when he has always been able to smoothly combine allegory and reality, does he insist on hitting us over the head with statements so oddly affected and pretentious as "America's need to make things American, to own them … was the mark of an odd insecurity"? No explanation follows this vast generalization, as if none were needed, as if everyone agrees with Rushdie's tired reinterpretation of New York as a soulless city.
But despite all that is misplaced and misused, Rushdie does not completely submerge his talent. In places, there are hints of the Rushdie seen in "Haroun and the Sea of Stories," the mischievous side that delights in shattering expectations as much as he loves rebuilding them. One scene from Solanka's youth, in which he encounters a reclusive mystic with a tongue-twister name (try repeating Balasubramanyam Venkataraghavan five times), works the conventions of magical realism to charming effect. This scene only reminds us of what we are missing and fails to gel with the rest of the novel.
"Fury" has almost none of Rushdie's trademark flurry of words. Admittedly, his previous great works were, at times, virtually incomprehensible, but there was always a magic about their sheer verbosity and linguistic brilliance, while here we receive a more tedious version of events, culminating in a denouement that would seem tragic if we actually cared about any of the characters in the story.
By centering "Fury" around dolls (artistically and intellectually), Rushdie reduces New York to little more than a dollhouse, miniaturized and crudely painted, all energy drained. In a city as vast as New York, Rushdie should have been able to find characters and situations worthy of any story he wanted to tell. The mediocrity of "Fury" can only be attributed to a blunder by an otherwise spectacularly talented author-not to the location.