Fury by Salman Rushdie
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Eat Me, America

Anger, unaccountable, existentially driven, psychologically depressing, non—directive anger is the subject matter of Fury. It is anger without a source and without any definite object, pure anger at being alive. It is anger that cannot be assuaged by apology or bought off by restitution. If one were religious, it might be directed toward God in a Job-like tirade. But in an atheist like Solly Solanka it can only be bottled up and leak out unexpectedly for the most trivial reason.

Solly, a cosmopolitan native of the sub-continent, is aware of his paradoxical situation. He has no reason to be angry; yet he is. This makes him angrier still. The world is alien to him. Not just the people but also the architecture, the food, the culture. Everything irritates him from the insane chat of the cleaning lady to the trivialities of the gossip mags. Every comment, every sound, every person grates. He knows it’s his fault, not theirs. But does that really matter?

Solly collects dolls. In fact he made a fortune through dolls - not by collecting but by creating a best selling one called Little Brain. His commercial success has allowed him to bail from his academic Cambridge donnery (dondom? donnage?) to join the New York glitterati as a media luvvie. This is somewhat strange because one of the few things that Solly knows he is really, really angry about is America. He hates its foreign policies, its garish superficiality, its casual racism, its self-satisfied neediness to make anything worthwhile in the world into a commodity it owns.

Solly has escaped Europe precisely because of what America is. “America is the great devourer, and so I have come to America to be devoured,” he says. His anger is not even noticed in America where everyone is angry about something, and where there are even people like him who are angry about everything. Solly is in his element - the pseudo-sophisticated sham of the Manhattan bien-pensant baroque culture of death. He doesn’t want to be a part of this culture, he wants to be consumed by it as a response to his own self-disgust.

Unfortunately all this anger goes nowhere. It is never explained or resolved but peters out in an unfortunate and sordid set of romances. Kingsley Amis’s Money covered more or less the same ground but with much less hoopla and name dropping. As an almost prophetic statement of the psychological situation of the world just prior to 9/11, I suppose it has merit. But as a novel it’s a collection of snappy lines and even snappier digs that goes nowhere..

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