Wild in the Streets

Art critic Clement Greenberg once described someone as being “stupid as a painter.” Painters consider his remark high praise. For them, Greenberg meant to say that because artists’ very viscera are lined with thought, they don’t need to think their way to the truth. Artists’ instincts do the driving; their minds catch up later. Interpretation comes later too, in the eye of the spectator. Yet the real meaning of a painting cannot be articulated in any language other than the idiom of brushstroke and paint.

In this sense, Salman Rushdie is a stupid novelist, as opposed to, say, the highly reflective Saul Bellow or Milan Kundera. Just as Jackson Pollock’s intelligence lay in his technique and materials, Rushdie’s ideas--about society, about culture, about politics--are embedded in his stories and in the interlocking momentum with which he tells them. His reflective power lies in the way his fiction simply unfolds. All of Rushdie’s synthesizing energy, the way he brings together ancient myth and old story, contemporary incident and archetypal emotion, transfigures reason into a waking dream.

Of course, you cannot grasp any genuine work of fiction with reason alone. But until the advent of modernism and so-called postmodernism, novels usually ran along the rational rails of a beginning, a middle and an end. Modernist and postmodernist writing, however, seek to reproduce the way life actually comes at us, twisting and bending meaning and dispensing with the conventional narrative. But there is a paradox here. Although life is indeed random and discontinuous, that is not how we experience it. We impose on the teeming mess of our existence a narrative order; we break the bewildering stream of our days into storified bits and pieces with beginnings, middles and ends. This is realism’s conundrum: The raw material of experience and how we mentally organize that experience seem impossible to reconcile in fiction. Enter, in the ‘70s and ‘80s, the novels of Rushdie and Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

As different as they are, these two writers each wrote at least one novel that had no traditional beginning, middle or end but that contained story upon story which did possess the conventional structure of older realist fiction. If there is a single reason why Rushdie’s “Midnight’s Children” and Garcia Marquez’s much earlier “One Hundred Years of Solitude” set the world’s imagination on fire, it is because Rushdie and Garcia Marquez somehow--at least formally--solved the realist conundrum. Through the overall formlessness of the novel, they captured the way life comes at us; through the conventional form of the particular stories, they captured the way we mentally make sense of life.

Rushdie has been plowing other fields of invention in novel after novel. An erudite re-spinner of the timeless old stories, he endeavors to express them in a distinctly contemporary voice. Rushdie has restlessly remade himself: in “Midnight’s Children” making the narrator also the main character; in the “Satanic Verses” telling the tale as if it were disembodied wisdom reciting itself; in “The Ground Beneath Her Feet,” his last novel, making his photojournalist-narrator both witness and character, along the lines of Joseph Conrad’s Marlow or F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Nick Carraway.

In “Fury,” the story of Professor Malik “Solly” Solanka is told in the third person, but his experience seems so intimately bound to the narrator’s that he soon comes to occupy the epicenter of his own epic. In this regard, “Fury” shares an affinity with “Midnight’s Children.” But in his latest work, Rushdie has faltered; he has lost the exquisite balance he once maintained between the portrayal of raw experience and truthfulness to the way we make sense of experience. He has crushed his formal beauty under the weight of casual commentary.

Rushdie has always built his novels out of the rich clay of mostly Indian myth and folklore, but for this tale, his first novel set entirely in America--New York City, to be exact--he has internalized two indigenous sources: Saul Bellow’s “Mr. Sammler’s Planet” and Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby.” In fact, “Fury” seems almost to be a conscious imitation of Bellow’s 1970 work, in which a Polish-born and British-educated Holocaust survivor acidly surveys the cultural riot of the ‘60s and ‘70s from his refuge on the Upper West Side.

Bellow has become the equivalent of Plymouth Rock for British writers living and working in America, so many of whom seem to regard writing about him, or meeting him, or writing about meeting him as some kind of rite of passage to the New World. With “Fury,” Rushdie has pioneered a new approach, having decided to rewrite Bellow by trying to inhabit Bellow’s imagination. He treats Bellow’s novel the way Joyce appropriated Homer’s “Odyssey” in “Ulysses”: as a cultural archetype that needs to be re-imagined for present-day readers.

Like Artur Sammler, Solanka lives on the Upper West Side, is highly educated and sports a British accent. The very name “Solly” is more Jewish than Indian and fools at least one of Solanka’s neighbors into thinking that he is a Jew. And before long we meet a Jewish plumber, a Holocaust survivor, through whom Rushdie burlesques one of “Mr. Sammler’s Planet’s” most famous sentiments (“through all the confusion and degraded clowning of this life ... he did meet the terms of his contract”): “I haff liffed my life. I haa kept, eh? My appointment.”

“Mr. Sammler’s Planet” was a dazzling screed against the culture of the ‘60s, driven by Sammler-Bellow’s vertiginous ruminations on society, politics and history. That novel posed a question: Had things gotten so bad that it was time to “blow this great blue, white, green planet” and travel to outer space? An Indian scientist, as it happens, named Dr. Lal has plans to make just such an escape possible. In “Fury,” an embittered, world-weary Solanka says, “Scan me, digitize me, beam me up. If the past is the sick old Earth, then, America, be my flying saucer. Fly me to the rim of space. The moon’s not far enough.”

The horror that Sammler thought he observed running wild in the streets expressed itself in the eruption of private desire into public life, dehumanization--as he saw it--through sexual promiscuity and the protean fluidity of the performing American self. Though Rushdie wants to rebut Bellow, even satirize him, he takes up where Bellow left off. Like so many recent novels and nonfiction books, movies and even paintings and installations, “Fury” is stunningly high-concept, and like these other kindred works in different genres, the concept outruns the execution.

Through Solanka’s anguished retrospection, we learn that he once taught philosophy at Cambridge University. Bored by his professorial duties, Solanka accepted an offer from the BBC to develop a television series popularizing the history of philosophy. He invented a doll, called “Little Brain,” which traveled through time to interview the great philosophical minds of the past. Inevitably, Solanka’s creation came to be removed from its creator’s hands. The first sign of trouble occurred during the segment on Galileo, when Solanka’s bosses demanded that he excise amiable references to destroying Rome and the pope. Eventually, Little Brain was commodified and dumbed-down, leaving an unprotesting Solanka feeling as though he had been forced, like Galileo, to recant. He also became rich and famous.

The doll-maker himself is turned into a thing, and his inanimate creation takes on a new life as an international celebrity. Thus the fury. As Solanka’s suicidal best friend, also a celebrity-professor, puts it: “You wake up one day and you aren’t a part of your life .... Your life doesn’t belong to you. Your body is not ... yours. There’s just life, living itself. You don’t have it. You don’t have anything to do with it.” Or, as Solanka formulates such a condition, thinking about his friend: “The more he became a Personality, the less like a person he felt.” Solanka soon finds himself in the same crisis. Gripped by a rage whose cause he cannot fathom--”Othello” is another allusion in this novel’s rich literary fabric--he finds himself one night standing over his wife and child holding a kitchen knife and, shortly afterward, he flees to America in fear and despair.

For Rushdie, America is the headquarters of thingification. It is the place where desire transforms people into things or where people’s own desires backfire and turn the wanter into an objectified wantee. England is bad enough--Rushdie has great fun alluding to the image of the ruined giant wych-elm in E.M. Forster’s “Howards End” as a symbol of England’s decline--but American anomie is state of the art. This is, as Solanka considers it, because “[h]ere in Boom America ... human expectations were at the highest levels in human history, and so, therefore, were human disappointments.... People were waking up ... and realizing that their lives didn’t belong to them.”

Solanka himself has gone to America in an Alpine state of expectation: “He had flown to the land of self-creation ... the country whose paradigmatic modern fiction was the story of a man who remade himself

But just as murder lies waiting for high-bouncing, self-created Gatsby, what Solanka finds in America is increasing numbers of disappointed and enraged people shooting to death, or otherwise doing away with, other people. Though Rushdie wants, at points, to turn Bellow on his head, he makes the bitterly apocalyptic “Mr. Sammler’s Planet” look like the “Tale of Squirrel Nutkin.” At “Fury’s” core are the mysterious murders and scalpings of three Upper East Side debutantes, crimes which at one point Solanka thinks he has committed in a furious trance.

Such extreme acts are, for Rushdie, the correlative of contemporary humankind’s normal state of affairs. Just as the unspeakable image of Sammler fighting his way through twisted corpses up out of a mass grave in Poland is at the heart of Bellow’s novel, the nightmare revelation of a stepfather sexually abusing a little boy is at the dark center of “Fury”--the very image of rage and rage-producing trauma, of dehumanization, of a spiritually genocidal condition in the midst of peace and prosperity.

Like menin, the wrath in the “Iliad,” fury courses through this novel in all its degrees. There are some riveting, joyful, original set pieces here, and when Rushdie allows his stories to enact his ideas, he strikes gold off the page. These little tales are fragments of what this novel might have been: a return to the articulate form of his earlier work. Rushdie writes about Solanka: “Life is fury, he’d thought. Fury--sexual, Oedipal, political, magical, brutal--drives us to our finest heights and coarsest depths .... The Furies pursue us; Shiva dances his furious dance to create and also to destroy.” And so we meet an angry Jewish plumber, an angry Muslim cabdriver, angry rich white boys, an angry black professional, angry ex-wives, an angry young woman and her angry young boyfriend. Anger hits the high notes in all the existential categories: sex, money, love, politics--the novel ends in a faraway country, in the midst of a revolution whose twining cords of rage and objectification are impossible to sort out. And there is, as there almost always is in Rushdie, an exceeding beautiful Shiva-like woman, in this case, Neela Mahendra, who represents fury’s dual nature and nearly redeems the melancholy Solanka.

But if fury is the theme that ties the novel’s incidents together, the device that binds the theme to the story is a constant editorializing that is like an unwitting caricature of Bellow’s reflective style. This is where Rushdie’s intelligence gets in the way of his fantastically gifted viscera. He has original stories, but he does not have original ideas. And the truly epic vision of people obscurely stimulated and mysteriously disappointed, of people cut off from the sources of their anger, is more of a story than an idea.

But Rushdie wants to be explicit, and the result is that Solanka’s reflections belong in balloons: “Who demolished the City on the Hill and put in its place a row of electric chairs, those dealers in death’s democracy, where everyone, the innocent, the mentally deficient, the guilty, could come to die side by side? Who paved Paradise and put up a parking lot? Who settled for George W. Gush’s boredom and Al Bore’s gush? Who let Charlton Heston out of his cage and then asked why children were getting shot?” Rushdie’s finely woven imagination is vast and playful and wise, but his naked attitudes are small and conventional.

Indeed, Rushdie exploits the charges of racism that Bellow’s smuggest detractors have leveled at him for years. In “Mr. Sammler’s Planet’s” most notorious incident, a black man stalks and finally exposes himself to Sammler; in “Fury,” the janitor uses a disparaging Yiddish word for blacks, and the barbarians are rich white boys who kill and scalp rich white girls. Rushdie seems to want to say that Bellow got it wrong; it’s the white power structure that stalks and menaces and destroys. This is not only an embarrassing dig at Bellow, who is hardly an apologist for any power structure. It is an even more embarrassing anachronism right out of “The Bonfire of the Vanities.”

Rushdie’s excoriations of dehumanizing contemporary life end up restating and caricaturing “Sammler,” just as his dashing of Solanka’s hopes for a new life restates and trivializes “Gatsby,” and his portrait of social decline reiterates and makes banal “Howards End.” Rather than transforming these not-so-old tales, Rushdie seems to be using them as substitutes for his own art. One gets the sense that for Rushdie, to borrow a phrase from Bellow, the veils of Maya have worn thin. Like Garcia Marquez in “The General in His Labyrinth,” and like the recent Philip Roth, Rushdie seems impatient with reality; he seems to want to push art out of the way and go mano a mano with the literal facts. The result is a work of fiction thrown into the river of reality with facts and mere opinions pushed into its pockets like stones. The terrible disclosure of incest, meant as a shattering climax, has too much newsprint on it to work as an artistic event.

In Rushdie’s case, though, something more personal than impatience with pretense seems to be at work. It is hard to sympathize with the imperfect though saintly Solanka, who is constantly feeling sorry for himself on account of his fame, his wealth, his many women and even his relationship with Neela, who is portrayed--with brilliant comedy--as the most gorgeous woman in the cosmos.

Celebrity seems to have imposed its own fatwa on Rushdie. A lack of true feeling rather than fury seems to impel him. Though he gestures furiously, he is simply not furious enough, but at the same time he seems unappeased by his own consoling gift. The more he has become a Writer, the less like a writer he seems to feel. And yet, to paraphrase the final sentence of “Mr. Sammler’s Planet,” Rushdie knows his own dilemma. He knows, he knows, he knows.