FURY

Salman Rushdie, the much praised and prize-winning author, has a gorgeous voice and reads as well as he writes, which is quite a thing to say about someone who writes like Salman Rushdie. Fury, his first deliberately American novel, is not only set in New York, but also deals with such very American preoccupations as popular culture, celebrity, sex, childhood abuse, and society murder. It takes him a while to get his ducks in a row, but when at last it becomes apparent that his subject is not simply the midlife rage of the protagonist Malik Solanka, but the larger and much more terrible Furies, as in the Greek Eumenides, currently loose in the world, it becomes at once brilliant, frightening, more mythic than believable, and yet shockingly entertaining. B.G. (c) AudioFile 2002, Portland, Maine [Published: AUG/SEP 02]