"Where you going with that
Gun in your hand ... "
The Jimi Hendrix version of that old folk song kept rippling through my head as I was reading Salman Rushdie's harrowing, compelling, and occasionally exasperating memoir Joseph Anton. The book itself is the story that had to be told, the story that anyone who is not a member of the infamous "Page 15 Club" but who actually read The Satanic Verses beginning to end and recognized its brilliance has always, always wanted to hear -- not to mention the millions of fellow travelers who did not or could not read the book but were incensed at the mullahs' attempted crimes against humanity and free expression. Rushdie tells the story with consummate skill, and for reasons that will be explained later in this review, it is far and away his best work since The Satanic Verses appeared in 1988.
To his critics, however, "Joseph Anton" had a gun in his hand. He "shot down" "his" "religion"; a capital crime, in the eyes of the misguided and inflexible. He offended The People, that hydra-headed excuse for irrational thinking embraced by his leftist friends, and in a particularly bitter passage, he explains that his situation:
"was a tough one for the left to deal with: How should one react when the masses
were being irrational? Could `the people' ever be, quite simply, wrong? ...It was not
possible, in the thinking of socialist intellectuals, that the people had misjudged him.
The people could not be wrong."
"Hey Joe
Where you gonna run, where you gonna hide ... "
The position presented here is that the Special Branch honchos orchestrating his survival in those first two or three awful years just didn't like the man, didn't like the arts or brown-skinned people or lefties, didn't understand and didn't care and didn't want to. At the official level, Rushdie reports, he was "treated like a naughty child," and at the personal, what he went through shouldn't happen to the worst enemy of one's own choice. An electrician in the house could compel hours of sweaty concealment behind the shower curtain, for all the world like the actually existing Joseph Conrad's secret sharer cowering in the captain's bath. An alcoholic bodyguard blabbing in a pub leads to a wrenching move and the loss of some six months' rent on a house that has been "blown." An Indian politician delivers a ringing excoriation of an opposition colleague only to find out he was condemning "the wrong Salman." And so on.
With admirable patience and self-control Rushdie takes us from the outwardly confident, inwardly terrified first days of the fatwa through the Grand Guignol of his second marriage (an operatic mashup of Der Fliegender Hollander and Lucia de Lammermoor) into the sappy, semi-happy days between 1992 and 1998, when he found love with a much younger woman of limited ambition while actually "moving the f[*]cking mountain" of hate, inertia, and excuses. He wearily recounts the avalanche of snark sent hurtling down upon him every day by the sadistic British media (what he calls the "Daily Insult"), and is clearly hurt by those who argued he cost too much to protect (in one of the famous ironic tropes surrounding his history, The Satanic Verses made him a wealthy man). As the 90s progress and his way becomes easier thanks to private machinations, we see the writer slowly transform, becoming stronger, braver, less driven by emotion, more informed by events taking place outside his precious literary world, more cautious, more nuanced, less needful. That last was bad news for the unambitious woman, by now the mother of his second child.
At any rate, almost as soon as the fatwa is officially lifted, Rushdie leaves the knife sticking in Wife #3 and resettles in NY.
"I'm going ...
Where I can be free."
Surprisingly for one who, pre-89, trashed America in his fiction, R. comes across as sincerely appreciative of this country's freedoms, not to mention the fact that the American press left him alone. However, once more he takes up with an inappropriate woman, this time an airhead fashion model who hauls him out to Los Angeles for her own purposes (the opera switches to Tannhauser). I had the pleasure of seeing R. during his stay here, when he addressed an overflow crowd one evening at UCLA; he seemed quite pleased with the world and himself at that time. None of the questions put to him had anything to do with books.
The memoir ends shortly after 9/11/01, when as R. quite accurately says, "The story of his little battle ... was coming to an end. The prologue was past and now the world was grappling with the main event." That the world, in particularly the U.S. under Barack Obama, has shown little interest in grappling but a great deal in apologizing, may yet be giving the author - who wants so desperately to be Left, despite the overwhelming evidence that those on that side are not his friends - tension headaches and gut-level fear. The publication of this memoir, after all, has prompted new cries of "ex-ter-mi-nate" from plunger-limbed robots in the Middle East.
So what's wrong with this book? Name-dropping is its worst offense. Those who have no interest in celebritude will be mystified by the author's apparent infatuation with boldface names from Harold Pinter to Madonna. The London/New York literary worlds have never seemed smaller, more blinkered, and less relevant to the planet as a whole as they appear in this otherwise outstanding work. Los Angeles is not just a series of restaurant names; although, to be fair, it's hard to get a decent grasp on one's environment while hanging out with airheads.
This is Rushdie's best book since The Satanic Verses, as I said at the beginning, because it is large, sprawling, complex, digressive, achingly witty, and honest. While The Moor's Last Sigh and The Ground Beneath Her Feet were brilliant in parts and largely unforgettable, the three shorter novels Rushdie has published since the millennium have not rung true. Fury was, frankly, bad; Shalimar the Clown disappointed with its surface and cliche-filled treatment of L.A., and The Enchantress of Florence dissolved into sci-fi improbability sans flair and fun. It's painful to run down an idol, but the fatwa took its toll (caveat: there may have been a fourth book, but after being burned three times I didn't bother). This reviewer hopes Joseph Anton will be the first of many more oversized canvases, that Rushdie's unique creativity will triumph over groundless literary self-restraint, that he will continue to explode upon the scene and rip the tops off peoples' heads for years and years to come(I myself, as must be obvious by now, have had nothing but a stump upon my shoulders for two decades). He may be a cad about women, and the worst bet in the world for a long-term relationship, but when it comes to intestinal fortitude, Salman Rushdie has grown kishkes of steel.
"Ain't no hangman
Gonna hang his noose on me."
Enjoy fast, free delivery, exclusive deals, and award-winning movies & TV shows with Prime
Try Prime and start saving today with fast, free delivery
