True, no other recent novel has for its hero a philosophy professor turned doll maker who leaves his wife and supposedly dear little son because he fears he’ll kill them in one of his murderous rages. (Rushdie withholds the unsurprising explanation until near the end, when a dire childhood memory, as he puts it, “flooded back.” I’d thought it was the son’s dear little malapropisms, like “rot around the tot” for “Rock Around the Clock.”) But too many novels feature such trite author stand-ins–and too many recent Woody Allen films feature a sad-sack intellectual in late middle age whom exquisite young women can’t resist.
What really sinks “Fury,” though, is the terminally stinky prose. “They stood facing each other like bloodied gladiators,” Rushdie writes of a lovers’ quarrel, “giving and receiving the wounds that would soon leave their love dead on the floor of this emotional Colosseum.” One woman’s hair and eyes “spoke volumes”; another’s love is “the philosopher’s stone that made possible the transmuting alchemy.” Rushdie has pages of boilerplate denouncing “Mall America,” whose people are “stressed-out, cracking up and talking about it all day long in superstrings of moronic cliche.” But in this glass house of a novel–well, you work out the metaphor. “Fury” ruined my taste for it.
