Rock and Rushdie - Review

National Review, May 17, 1999 by James Gardner

James Gardner

The Ground Beneath Her Feet, by Salman Rushdie (Holt, 575 pp., $27.50)

Nothing by Salman Rushdie can ever be wholly bad. Like Pollock or Horowitz in their respective arts, he has been blessed with a style so original and beguiling that even when he falls on his face he is still eminently worth reading.

That, unfortunately, is the best that can be said for The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Rushdie's first novel in four years. As fiction, this book fails for all the usual reasons that novels of this sort fail. Rushdie is a "modernist," a writer of what Barthes calls romans illisibles. Thus he is pleased to challenge, rather than to accept as given, the conventions of traditional narrative. And yet, it takes a different kind of mind from Rushdie's to see beyond the exuberant license that this modern, experimental idiom allows and to embrace the severe discipline that it demands if it is to be done really well. Even in better works than this he has never displayed any conspicuous sense of structure or economy. Typically, his method is to spin yarns, often wonderful yarns, through episodic additions pulled together by recurring themes. But he can never banish a sense of opulent arbitrariness from his work, and this arbitrariness has never been more in evidence than in The Ground Beneath Her Feet.

The plot is a postmodern reenactment of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. The internationally renowned Indian rock star Ormus Cama is a mixture of Elvis Presley, John Lennon, and Ravi Shankar. He is hopelessly enamored of Vina Apsara, another musical mega-star and India's answer to Madonna and Lady Di. The Ground Beneath Her Feet is a recounting of their checkered careers and mutual infatuation over four decades and three continents. From the beginning, however, we know how it will end. For in the very first scene, as Vina is making love to a third party in Guadalajara, an earthquake swallows her up and she is gone. After a detailed narration of the earlier lives of both of the leading characters, we find Ormus metaphorically seeking Vina through a concert tour called "Into the Underworld." Whether he has found her at last, reincarnated as the younger singer Mira, is left ambiguous. In the end, Ormus is slain, not by a group of raging maenads, like the Orpheus of myth, but by a lone groupie with a handgun. For Rushdie the Orphean parallel is the peg for a series of meditations on art, mass culture, and millennarianism. And yet, after reading a quarter of a million words, one may question the grace with which Rushdie has fitted modern reality to the ancient myth. Most often this parallel seems obvious, arbitrary, and more trouble than its worth.

It does not help matters that neither the principal characters, nor the obsequious narrator, Rai, are especially compelling. There is something inter- changeable about all three: they become ciphers to be filled with Rushdie's musings on everything from geopolitics to comparative mythology to nouvelle vague cinema. As in most of his work, there is often real humor in Rushdie's depiction of these characters. And yet, he makes the fatal mistake of being too impressed by their rock-star glamour, something that, perhaps, he had originally intended to mock. He never sees them with true irony. And despite the arbitrary complexities that he attributes to them, he never succeeds in animating them with the emotional vitality that has so memorably enlivened his characters in the past.

The two dominating influences in Rushdie's fiction have always been Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Thomas Pynchon. At his best he is better at being Marquez than Marquez himself, and at his worst he is better at being Pynchon than Pynchon himself. From this Marquezian element emerges the enchanted realism of Rushdie's best works, Midnight's Children and The Moor's Last Sigh, and its locus is usually India. It is this mother lode of enchantment that bestirs Rushdie to poetry and to deep emotional empathy with his characters. But the Pynchonesque idiom, never wholly absent from his fiction and conspicuous in some of the stories in East, West, is most often evidenced in a cutesy appetite for trivial wordplay and gonzoid conspiracy theories. And it is this strain that, for the first time, dominates The Ground Beneath Her Feet. You see it in the need to call certain minor characters Basquiat, Schnabel, and Hulot, to have Ormus done in by a bullet from a ".09 mm Giuliani & Koch," and at one point to speculate in passing, and for no apparent reason, that JFK and RFK were assassinated on the same day and by the same bullet.

The Pynchonesque element in Rushdie's work comes into play most conspicuously when he turns from India to depict the West. One was not encouraged, then, to hear him say, in a recent interview in the New York Times, that "the subject of India seems to have gone away for the moment. In a way, the moment in this novel when the novel leaves India seems to have been pretty final for me. . . . the stuff I'm mulling around at the moment doesn't have to do with the East. It has to do with that very large part of my experience which is Western." Of course, there is no reason Rushdie should not write about the West, since he has lived here most of his life and since he is writing for Western consumption. Yet in thus shifting his attention to the West he enters a crowded field and, to all appearances, he has little to contribute that could compare in originality or beauty to his writings about the East.