‘I FEEL LIKE I HAVE SURVIVED A GREAT GLOBAL TRAGEDY’
Rushdie’s latest novel tackles racism and the rise of barbaric behaviour
Back in March, Salman Rushdie was awaiting the publication of the paperback version of his novel Quichotte when the coronavirus hit. New York City, his home for the past 20 years, became the U.S. centre for the virus. “It was very bad here, it was scary,” Rushdie said. “I got ill really very early, the first day I ran a fever was the Ides of March. I was fortunate that I didn’t have to go to hospital. At that point going to hospital felt really dangerous.
“I was lucky it didn’t affect my breathing, especially as someone who, as a 73-year-old, is in the high-risk bracket. And being a longtime asthma sufferer, I was really very worried about it getting to my chest. I had a two-week roller-coaster of a fever that would go up to 103.5 F (39.7 C) and then come back down to normal and shoot back up. Mostly I just felt very physically debilitated.”
Here we are now, talking over Zoom about the delayed launch of Quichotte, his dizzying and brilliant 14th novel. The week after we spoke, Rushdie was one of the 150 writers, academics and artists who signed an open letter in Harper’s Magazine decrying “a vogue for public shaming and ostracism.”
Over email he said, “the viciously personal attacks on the letter’s signatories make the letter’s point very eloquently.”
You may think he would’ve been prepared for life under lockdown, given how Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa forced him to spend much of the 1990s in safe houses, but he scotches that idea. “Having a threat aimed at oneself is really not the same as having an avalanche of death falling all around you. It doesn’t feel the same at all. I feel like I have fortunately survived a great global tragedy, and what happened to me is not at all like that.”
Quichotte (pronounced keyshot) is a novel attentive to the contemporary moment and it confronts racism more directly than Rushdie’s previous novels.
At first impression the novel appears primarily a literary game, a playful modern update on Don Quixote that involves an Indian American, his mind addled by TV, taking his invented son, Sancho, on a road trip across America in a quest to woo a famous actress. It is rich in pastiche, invoking Pinocchio, Ionesco, Voltaire and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, and is fantastical, featuring a talking cricket and metamorphosing mastodons. What’s more, the Quichotte story is actually being written by Brother, a middling spy novelist, who encodes his own biography into his tale of Quichotte. In fact, Quichotte is a novel packing both personal and political heft. Quichotte’s quest might be absurd, but there is pathos in his attempts to be a good father to Sancho.
“The emotional heart of the book is this question of different kinds of love. Not romantic love but the love found in families: fathers and sons, brothers and sisters, and what can go wrong between them and whether that can be mended. My relationship with my sons is pretty good, I think (he has two, Zafar, 40, and Milan, 23), but my relationship with my father was very bad for most of my adult life, and then it was OK again right at the end. I wanted to write out of both of those experiences.”
Perhaps even more emotionally complex is Rushdie’s depiction of the way Brother seeks reconciliation with his estranged sister.
“I have a sister who lives in London who is one year younger than myself and has always been more or less the closest person to me in my life. We have always had that feeling of really intimate connection. I wanted to imagine what it would be like if that wasn’t so, if it were a broken relationship and I began to feel how painful it might be and how you might fix that.”
As Quichotte and Sancho travel, they face prejudice, whether it is in the small-town Kansas or in New York City’s Central Park, where Sancho is beaten up by a group of white men in business suits, who appear to have broken leashes around their necks.
“I just wanted to ask, ‘who let the dogs out?’ It’s the idea of barbarian behaviour being in some way literally unleashed in this moment. Sometimes the best way to use a metaphor is to literalize it. I think it’s a scary scene. I wanted to say that this is not just happening in working-class red-state America.
It’s not just good ol’ boys in Kansas, it’s everywhere.”
Rushdie would rather know what people are thinking, even if it lays the ugly parts of our nature bare.
“I have the sense something real has shifted. The population as a whole has become aware of the issue of race in America in a way it used to be able to forget about. A large section of the white population found itself able to behave as if this wasn’t a big issue. For the Black population this is nothing new, it has always been going on. The (George) Floyd killing does seem to have been a tipping point, but then I’m no good at being a prophet.”
He paused. “I have had some trouble with prophets in my time.”