The American Voice

Fury

Random House, 259 pp., $24.95

It is a trick of the mind, Salman Rushdie writes in his new novel Fury, to see human life made small, reduced to doll size. So there's his grand metaphor for the phenomenon of literature, one might suppose. Cast a wide net and make your catch small. He does start his narrative with a respectable chance at capturing this miniature vision by placing his protagonist, the painfully smug Malik Solanka, maker of dolls and deserter of wives, in the middle of still-opulent New York City in the summer of 2000. "The city boiled with money," he writes. With the riches of the city and the unraveling of the summer's events so close at hand, there's no better place for Rushdie to cast his big net, after all. But the material he returns -- from boring rants about the Elian Gonzalez family to tactless vamps who seek sexual intimacy with any legitimate writer around -- lack any of the beauty, form, or intelligence of an entire world rendered small by the skills of a true and sentient artist.

Solanka himself is a drifting intellectual, born in Bombay, educated in England, now fabulously rich in New York City. His fortune has come by way of creating a successful television series for the BBC in which a small doll called Little Brain travels through the history of philosophy and wrestles through ensuing hijinks with historical figures: "Bertrand Russell being clubbed by policemen at a wartime pacifist rally," and so on. With riches come new tastes, the allure of America's glitter, and the next thing he knows, Solanka is standing over his sleeping wife trying to decide whether to hack her to pieces or not. He doesn't. Instead, he moves to the New World, falls for an impossible woman, and hacks himself to pieces over a long period of time. Sadly, Rushdie's vision of both himself and the world around him are too skewed by self-absorption and cultural misinterpretation for him to come up with a novel as amusing as the idea of dolls fighting their way through a history which hardly exists.