May 26, 2012 · www.gothamgazette.com

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Fury
by Salman Rushdie

Salman Rushdie is best-known as the Indian-born writer who was forced into hiding for years after the fundamentalist leader of Iran issued a death sentence against him in 1989 because of the contents of his novel The Satanic Verses . Two years ago, he moved to New York City, having felt "ridiculously comfortable" on every visit, he recently told an interviewer at Salon, "as if I actually lived here when in fact I didn't know it very well. It has to do with it being an immigrant city, a city whose culture is created by successive waves of migration. It's the only city in the world -- since I left Bombay -- where I've actually felt normal, or at least everybody else is abnormal in the same way."'

After less than a year in residence, he produced his eighth novel, Fury (Modern Library, 2001), the first to take place in the United States. (A year later, he has just published Step Across This Line: Collected Nonfiction 1992-2002) An immigrant's tale, Fury is set in New York City, depicting the culture of wealth, ambition and promise, as well as of rage and violence, that the 'Golden Age' of the late 1990s brought to the city.

"America is the devourer, and I have come to be devoured," declares Malik Solanka, who was once a history professor but who now at the age of 55 has become a disillusioned doll maker, determined to live as a sanyasi, living the life of celibacy and solitude. The novel opens shortly after he shows up in Manhattan, self-sentenced to American exile:

"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! No longer a historian but a man without histories let me be. I'll rip my lying mother tongue out of my throat and speak your broken English instead. Scan me, digitize me, beam me up. If the past is the sick old Earth, then, America, be my flying saucer."

Solanka sets down in "Boom America" of the late nineties. The setting of the novel doubles as one of its main subjects; the story of New York toldthrough Rushdie's eclectic cast of New Yorkers. There's Neela (a woman so beautiful that she literally stops traffic, and who yearns to return to her homeland to fight a revolution), Jack Rhinehart (a shell-shocked black war correspondent who smashes telephones while sleeping and yearns to be a rich, white man) and the mystery of the cartoon characters prowling the city streets at night with chunks of concrete, ready to smash the skulls of their victims. New York isn't an easy place to be a sanyasi. Solanka's solitude and celibacy are challenged ruthlessly, as is his sanity. He finds New York full of fury, loud and intrusive at every turn. In cabs the drivers unconsciously spit hideous invective out into the street. In the line to the movie theatre pedestrians shout intimate details of their personal life into their cell phones. In street-side shops, "the unsayable [is] right there in the window in red letters a foot high." But living on the brink of being overcome by fury has made America a place with enormous potential. Wealth is everywhere for the taking. Expectations soar. Solanka's failure in Britain came when his doll Little Brain left him behind to pursue fame and fortune. In New York Solanka finds himself inspired to create once more. He's pushed on by Mila, the girl-next-door who coincidentally dresses like Little Brain and has a team of high tech lackeys at her disposal. She sets out to help him to realize the full potential of his vision. And suggests that the lot of them get rich in the process.

Rushdie book was published in September, 2001, which may explain why it did not get more attention. If it skillfully paints a portrait of New York, it is a different New York than the one that exists just a year later, with the freewheeling Giuliani years gone, replaced by worries about budget cuts and fare hikes. Fury now reads like a historical novel.

Posted 11/18/2002