He’s in a New York state of mind.

t wasn’t so long ago that New York City seemed to throb with an indefatigable pulse of trivial ephemera, but reading Fury, Salman Rushdie’s eighth novel, makes that city feel ever more distant. Yet if you’re feeling sentimental about the New York that once was—and will never be again, as some have gloomily declared—beware that Fury won’t take you back to a fun, blitzed-out version of the city that never sleeps. Actually, it doesn’t sum up New York at all, unless you think the Big Apple is merely and only a vibrantly vapid, regurgitative and derivative mess.

Professor Malik Solanka, creator of a popular animated BBC program featuring a group of lofty-minded, intellectually curious dolls (the princess of them dubbed “Little Brain”), has escaped to New York, leaving behind a patient-to-saintly-proportions wife and idolizing son. He prays for New York to swallow him whole with its furious media obsession and caustic anonymity. It’s a fury not unlike the nameless one that sent him fleeing his comfortable London surroundings; Solanka awoke startled one night holding a knife above his wife and child. Feeling he was no longer in control of his behavior, he left with little explanation.

Rushdie draws many parallels between Solanka’s creations, which eventually spin out of his control due to rampant success, and Solanka’s lack of control over himself, or more precisely, his varied reinventions of self. First, Malik, or “Solly,” was full ivory-tower material, then he became a family man, and, finally, attained mainstream success, antipode of his former self. How to reconcile the needs of all three? Running away from them seems to be Solanka’s cowardly but sympathetic response.

ut Rushdie ultimately abandons this war of the self in favor of chasing the tail of something far more ubiquitous yet even more elusive. For one, he tries to pin down the very nature of pop culture, prompting readers all over the world to cover their eyes and wait for the inevitable collision: It’s typically not a pretty thing when a literary writer of a certain stripe tries to discern the popular vagaries of P. Diddy or Lara Croft. And Rushdie is no different, especially considering he seems to completely disdain them. But could it be, as they say, that hate is the closest emotion to love?

It appears the author behind such works as Midnight’s Children and The Satanic Verses brought pop culture into the mix to sneer at its woeful insipidness and short-term memory while also borrowing some of its best tricks. Rushdie doesn’t know whether to condemn the culture and our fascination with it as intellectually bankrupt, or to throw up his hands and pronounce it merely all good fun. Some of the names, events (large and small) and whateverisms that Rushdie name-drops in an attempt to create a uniquely American tapestry: Jar Jar Binks, Max Headroom, Charlie Rose, Tiger Woods, SUVs, Zagat’s, I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter, Amazon.com, plus a whole host of other stars so famous we know them on a first-name basis (Gwynnie, Tom and Nic, et cetera).

It’s not unreasonable to suggest that most of us read to escape just the type of torrential maelstrom Rushdie inflicts upon us throughout Fury. While an author should feel no hesitation to pull in any influence, whether deemed high or low, if Andrew Cunanan and Monica Lewinsky are going to storm the set of a novel, they better be there for a damn good reason. But Rushdie never makes a good case for why these blighted characters need to be on the scene. He seems to have them on hand chiefly to impress us that he can be part of the literary set and know what the kids like, too.

Worst of all, he tries to find genuine parallels between his creation and tabloid fascinations like Elián González: “Solanka felt more than ever like a refugee in a small boat, caught between surging tides: reason and unreason, war and peace, the future and the past. Or like a boy in a rubber ring who watched his mother slip under the black water and drown.” It may be an impressive hat trick to empty two years worth of People magazine into your novel, but is it worth it?

ushdie seems so inspired by pop culture’s way of juggling several middling crises and curiosities at once that he clogged Fury with several middling and curious subplots. And some quite good ones that you wish could’ve been salvaged for their own book: In the best one, Solanka meets his match in Mila Milo, a dead ringer for his star creation, Little Brain. Mila is one of the book’s most fully realized characters; manipulative and icily intelligent, she is Rushdie’s most successful attempt to elucidate the clutches of pop culture. This young woman who hangs around on stoops in Solanka’s Manhattan neighborhood actually convinces the reader of her media savvy, though her dialogue is still harangued by a sense of overcompensation. (“I am privileged to lead the most fashion-forward geek posse in New York, and when I say geek, Professor, I mean genius. These kids are the coolest, and when I say cool I mean hot.”)

Mila is most interesting because of her role as muse, daughter and phantom lover in Solanka’s life. She tells Solanka about her powers of rehabilitation—“Some people do up houses. I renovate people.” And he takes her up on the offer. Solanka is not only being attacked by the city’s relentless furies and his own inward ones, his anger has manifested itself in bursts of invective and limited but frightening exhibitions of violence—which he can’t remember.

What’s particularly disturbing about Solanka’s violent blackouts is that New York has been recently plagued by a series of murders perpetrated by a mysterious, concrete-block-wielding madman who slinks around the city in a Panama hat and linen suit, much as Solanka does. It’s the book’s most fascinating subplot: Could this man have reinvented himself to the point of self-isolation and, ultimately, self-alienation? Could the very nature of his personality, his innate goodness, despite acknowledged traits of hypocrisy and cowardice, have frayed so badly as to expose the heart and soul of a psychopath?

But just as Mila seems to be getting down to the nitty-gritty of what’s eating Solanka, and we’re at the top of our concern for his well-being, Rushdie squelches it in favor of chasing down yet another character and subplot. This particular entry in Fury is downright embarrassing: Enter Neela Mahendra, a thinly veiled stand-in for Rushdie’s real-life girlfriend, Padma Lakshmi, a stunning Indian model/actress/bestselling cookbook author with a scar on her arm (there’s a real-life ex-wife and son back in England, too). Likewise, Neela is a stunning, scarred, multi-talented beauty, and Rushdie won’t let us forget her awesome and completely transfixing powers, as he reduces men in her company to bumbling fools prone to stutters and traffic accidents.

If this slapstick hyperbole was the tone for the whole of Fury, it might still be indulgent but pardonable. Instead it’s only awkward, especially once Neela is transformed into a martyr while documenting the struggles for independence in her fictitious Third World homeland. This is where Solanka notes the local obsession with all things American and how success is measured by whether you’re known in the Western world. “American success,” Rushdie writes, “had become the only real validation of one’s worth.”

Whatever American success may mean, it seems Rushdie let a certain definition of it get the best of his efforts. Fury ultimately drowns in the very thing it seems to critique.

Margaret Wappler also writes for Venus magazine and the Chicago alternative weekly Newcity.

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