40 PUBLISHERS WEEKLY ■ JULY 29, 2019
Author Profile
salesman “deranged by reality television” who falls in love with
the host of a daytime talk show whom he has never met. As
Quichotte (the name he takes in letters to his beloved) travels
across the country to meet Miss Salma R, a parallel plot concerns
the writer who created him; these twin story lines eventually
converge in a fantastical ending that tips its hat to some of the
science fiction tales Rushdie loved as a boy.
“It comes from the literary tradition of the picaresque novel,
combined with a certain kind of modernist playfulness,” Rushdie
says. “There’s quite a lot of Joyce in it. This was a scary book for
me to write, because I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to pull
it off. There are these two narrative lines, which echo and mirror
and talk to each other. I knew that the thing that would make the
book work was if by the end they could merge, and I really wasn’t
sure how to do that for a long time. I was quite nervous about it.”
Rushdie adds, “Normally I don’t show anyone a work in prog-
ress, but in this case when I had written 50 or 60 pages of the
first draft, I actually asked Andrew Wylie [his
agent] to read it. I said, ‘Look, this is very
weird, but I need to know if it’s good weird
or bad weird.’ And he said, ‘I don’t know
where you’re going to go with this, because
it could go in a lot of directions, but what I
can say is that it’s the funniest thing of yours
that I’ve read.’ That was comforting, and I’m
pleased to see in the early responses that a lot
of people have been finding it very funny.”
Rushdie says that he originally intended
Quichotte to be “a road novel about this crazy
old coot and his imaginary kid sidekick
[Rushdie’s riff on Cervantes’s Sancho Panza].”
He adds, “This other story just showed up,
and I thought, ‘Okay, I’m going to see where
it leads.’ I reserved the right to take it out,
but it just grew and became more and more
important. Somebody said that the book you
finish is never the book you began, and it was true with this
story line. One of the things I liked about it was that, whereas
the Quichotte story line is comic and playful, the author story
line is much more emotional.”
“I used to be much more of a planner,” Rushdie says. “When
I started out, I would have to have a lot of architecture before I
could start putting flesh on it. Now I understand much more
clearly the magic that happens on the page: the thing you didn’t
expect, the thing you couldn’t have thought of when you were
making a plan. When a book is working, the characters take
over. I’ve often thought about the process as being more one of
listening than of making; you sit there and listen to the people
you’ve made up, they tell you what they need, and then you try
and give it to them.”
Rushdie also used to be much more defensive about his work,
he acknowledges. “I would say, ‘Whose name is on the book?
Your name? No. As far as I know, it’s not your name it’s myname, so I get to decide.’ ” Considerably mellowed at age 72, he
notes, “I’ve gone from that position to feeling that I’ll take all
the help I can get, and I’m lucky that I have one of the great
old-school editors.”
The editor in question is Random House publisher and
editor-in-chief Susan Kamil. “She’s got the whole world to run,”
her appreciative author remarks, “but she made amazing
amounts of time for me. One day, she came over to my place and
we spent six hours going through Quichotte. I didn’t always agree
or do what she suggested, but she’s a very, very good reader and
I always listen to what she has to say.”
Rushdie takes pleasure in listening to the many voices that
have broadened the horizons of English-language literature in
the decades since he came to England from his native India to
attend boarding school. He lived in London after receiving an
MA from Cambridge University and found himself in the middle
of an explosion of expatriate literary energy. “In the 1970s,” he
says, “a whole bunch of writers who came
from all over the place—Kazuo Ishiguro,
Timothy Moe, Ben Okri, Caryl Phillips—
suddenly found themselves in the middle of
the conversation about English literature.”
Rushdie was part of that conversation;
indeed, he says, smiling ruefully, The Satanic
Verses was intended as an immigrant novel. “It
was my first attempt to write about leaving
the East and arriving in the West. When it
came out, one critic said—I’m paraphrasing—
‘What is all this stuff about Muslims doing in
a London novel?’ Now, of course, that ques-
tion has been answered by history.”
Moving to the U.S. around the turn of the
21st century, Rushdie says he saw the same
multicultural energy. “Immigrant literature
from all over the world is now becoming
American literature. You have all these won-
derful Vietnamese writers, Nigerian writers, Chinese writers; the
traditional American immigrant literature, which was Jewish,
Eastern European, or Italian, is now enormously expanded. Well,
that’s me, too; I showed up with other stories in my baggage.”
“Multiply rooted like an old banyan tree,” is how the Indian
American author in Quichotte refers to himself. “That’s become
the normal thing,” Rushdie adds in conversation. “I think of
someone like Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, as much American
as she is Nigerian but very much rooted in both places. For a
writer that is a blessing; it gives you the ability to see the world
in more ways. If you look at the last half-century, I think this is
the most interesting thing that’s happened in the English-
language novel. One of the things that’s nicest about being
the old guy in the room is that many of these writers are very
complimentary about the value of my work to them. It’s a river,
this thing; you get things from the people who came before, and
hopefully people take things from you and go on.” ■