114 Time Sept. 2–9, 2019
TimeOff Books
Quichotte, The Booker Prize long-lisTed
14th novel from Salman Rushdie, is pitched as a
“Don Quixote for the modern age,” but the book—a
brilliant, funny, world- encompassing wonder—is a
far more ambitious exercise than mere homage.
The titular character (pronounced Key-shot)
was born under a different name, in a city also
under a different name: Bombay, now Mumbai.
The Indian- immigrant traveling salesman of phar-
maceuticals, aging, addled into holy foolishness by
a lifetime of TV worship, and recently laid off, be-
stows the name Quichotte upon himself as a nod
to Cervantes’ famous knight, or rather, as a nod to
a French opera which was “loosely based” on the
book. (“It seems you’re a little loosely based your-
self,” Quichotte tells himself, aware that he might
be cracking up a bit.)
Under his nom de plume, he embarks on a pi-
caresque mission across America to win over the
heart of one Salma R, a beautiful celebrity in New
York City whom he knows only through the TV
screen. For a squire to ride beside him in his Chevy
Cruze, he conjures into being a son, named Sancho.
Quichotte is delighted to find out that the world, in
its fraying state, seems to bend under the strength
of his conviction, which bodes well for his impos-
sible dream. “The Age of Anything-Can-Happen!
How overjoyed he was, Quichotte exclaimed in-
wardly, how grateful he was to live in such a time!”
In this latter age of man, the narration continues, “A
whole nation might jump off a cliff like swarming
lemmings. Men who played presidents on TV could
become presidents. The water might run out... And
a TV star might miraculously return the love of a
foolish old coot, giving him an unlikely romantic
triumph which would redeem a long, small life, be-
stowing upon it, at the last, the radiance of majesty.”
But wait—we learn that Quichotte and Sancho
are characters twice removed, the fictional sub-
jects of a book being written by a midlist author
of middling spy fiction named Sam DuChamp,
who hopes to branch out into meaningful work
with “a book radically unlike any other he had
ever attempted.” Like his main character, he is also
an Indian immigrant operating under a nom de
plume, also in the autumn of his years, also drag-
ging behind him into an unknown future a knot-
ted and dysfunctional family history. If Quichotte
has been deranged by his consumption of media,
the man who is writing him into existence
has been deranged by his creation of it.
DuChamp describes the full scope of the book
that he is trying to write, which also happens to
describe Rushdie’s project: “He talked about want-
ing to take on the destructive, mind- numbing
junk culture of his time just as Cervantes had gone
to war with the junk culture of his own age. He
said he was trying also to write about impossible,
obsessional love, father-son relationships, sib-
ling quarrels and, yes, unforgivable things; about
Indian immigrants, racism toward them, crooks
among them; about cyber -spies, science fiction,
the intertwining of fictional and ‘real’ realities, the
death of the author, the end of the world.”
You would be right to think that for a writer
to take all of this on at once would be to risk a
mess of a novel. But in Rushdie’s hands all borders
are indeed porous: between author and subject,
reality and magic, hope and folly. As he weaves
the journeys of the two men nearer and nearer,
sweeping up a full accounting of all the tragicomic
horrors of modern American life in the process,
these energies begin to collapse beautifully
inward, like a dying star. His readers realize that
they would happily follow Rushdie to the end of
the world, which it turns out they will have to do.
If the writer is his work, and the work is its
characters, then they all die together. Like any
serious book, this one is written with a long view
toward the apocalypse, and the one written here
is shared evenly: the end of the book, the end of
Quichotte, the end of the author, and the end of
the world. And yet somehow, a glimmer of hope,
like an impossible dream, is left for us. FICTION
A fool’s
dream
By Nicholas Mancusi
△
Literary lion
Rushdie’s new
novel, set in
modern-day
America, takes on
the story of a man
like Don Quixote