Fuck you, Salman Rushdie.

December 13, 2006 at 1:16 pm | Posted in assholes, breaking news, h-dawg's book club, inappropriate, pop culture | 3 Comments

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So my brain is still fried from meeting that deadline yesterday, which means I’ve spent most of this morning halfheartedly working on my next one and enthusiastically reading trashy celebrity gossip. And look at this juicy Item! I ran across in Page Six:

LOCK up your daughters when Salman Rushdie and his son hit the party circuit.

The acclaimed author and his offspring are talking each other up as powerful chick magnets no woman can resist – with Zafar Rushdie, 27, even confessing he’s used his 59-year-old father’s prowess to score.

“Most people who go to a party with their parents try to run away from them. Not me. If I want to meet girls, I just stand near him,” Zafar gushes in a unusually candid interview with London’s Sunday Times.

“All the beautiful women want to talk to Dad, so I stand close and bask in the sunlight. Beauty loves brains.”

Salman, who lives in Manhattan with his fourth wife, topless model and actress Padma Lakshmi, 36, is equally complimentary of Zafar, talking him up as a red-hot ladies man who can’t be resisted.

“Every time I see a picture of him in the paper, he has four girls around him, so I think he’s not doing badly,” the author tells the paper. “He’s absurdly charming – lethally, disgustingly charming. He has it like a weapon.”

Ew. Shut up. Although you did hit close to the mark with ‘disgustingly charming’, Pompous Authorface. Whatever, I knew this already, everyone who read that piece of trash novel Fury knew this dude was a self-aggrandizing lech. I’m sure they’re out together and Assberet Author’s all ‘Apples don’t fall far from the tree, eh boy?’ and No.2 chuckles and says ‘Like father, like son, that’s the damn truth’. That’s right, Salman. I’m putting CLICHES IN YOUR MOUTH. DISGUSTING CLICHES.

Speaking of Fury, every review I’m finding for the book online basically says: hooray Salman Rushdie, you’re such an innovator! For example:

The author moved to this country at the beginning of 2000 and Fury takes on an autobiographical slant as its protagonist, Malik Solanka, also moves here from England (no fatwa nipping at the character’s heels, though). Other novels, like 1999s’ The Ground Beneath Her Feet, have included U.S. settings, but this is the first Rushdie novel which can truly be called American. Like a modern de Tocqueville, Rushdie has taken notes on the country, from sea to shining sea, and has set his observations loose on the page.

Here, we get pages and pages of jazz-like riffs on everything from Elian Gonzalez to the presidential contest between “Gush and Bore.” This is a time capsule for the first few days of our new millennium and it’s about as perfect as they come.

Thing is, that book is a real masterpiece of lazy bullshitting, not to mention five years past its relevancy date the day it was published. Also: Gush and Bore? Are you fucking kidding me? That counts as cleverness? And let’s not even get into the credibility of his female characters. I know you expect me to go there but let me just say that the mise en abyme has to do with puppets and it’s all too appropriate. We’ve got the slutty girl (who happens to be the spitting image of a doll the narrator has created) and the morality girl, a South Seas revolutionary. It’s the 21st century, which means the narrator sleeps with this heroine of the people and keeps her on a pedestal. Proof positive, ladies: we really do have it all!

Of course, we can count on Michiko to give a sober review, but the book still ended up on that year’s NY Times Notable Books list. I just don’t understand what’s notable about a book in which the plot is ‘Old man disillusioned with self and society; has dysfunctional family history; fucks some young gorgeous women’ deserves a mention as notable anything. Because the protagonist is cosmopolitan? What am I missing here?

I’m going to subject you to a passage from this book (sorry!) just in case you think I’m being harsh:

Everybody, as well as everything, was for sale. Advertisements had become colossi, clambering like Kong up the walls of buildings. What was more, they were loved. When he was watching TV, Solanka still turned the sound down at commercial breaks, but everyone else, he was sure, turned it up. The girls in the ads — Esther, Bridget, Elizabeth, Halle, Gisele, Tyra, Isis, Aphrodite, Kate — were more desirable than the actresses in the show in between; hell, the guys in the ads — Mark Vanderloo, Marcus Schenkenberg, Marcus Aurelius, Marc Antony, Marky Mark — were more desirable than the actresses in the shows. And as well as presenting the dream of an ideally beautiful America in which all women were babes and all men were Marks, after doing the basic work of selling pizza and SUVs and I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter, beyond money management and the new ditditdit of the dotcoms, the commercials soothed America’s pain, its head pain, its gas pain, its heartache, its loneliness, the pain of babyhood and old age, of being a parent and of being a child, the pain of manhood and women’s pain, the pain of success and that of failure, the good pain of the athlete and the bad pain of the guilty, the anguish of loneliness and of ignorance, the needle-sharp torment of the cities and the dull, mad ache of the empty plains, the pain of wanting without knowing what was wanted, the agony of the howling void within each watching, semiconscious self.

Omigod, Rushdie does Trainspotting. Disgustingly charming MY ASS. The only reason I’m so pissed is I really loved The Moor’s Last Sigh.