The American Spectator

The eight-city U.S. tour went off without alarms…

Elizabeth and he [Rushdie] did not remarry… but they were able to be better parents, and also the best of friends, and their true characters were shown not in the war they fought but in the peace they made…

His journal was full of doubts. “How can I stay with this woman whose selfishness is her       most prominent characteristic?”…

Hollywood was a small town inside a big city and for five minutes a new arrival such as himself became the flavor of the month…

and conspicuous consumption:

There was an apartment on Sixty-fifth Street and Madison across the street from the Armani store…

The commute between West Hollywood and Pembridge Mews was brutal…

But this [Telluride] was a mountain paradise…

are the order of the day — or rather the week, which is how long it took me to make my way (reluctantly) through the entire book.

Joseph Anton is meant to be an account of Rushdie’s life following the 1989 fatwa issued by the Ayatollah Khomeini, which drove him into hiding. It covers, then, roughly a single decade in twice the amount of pages with which Winston Churchill, in My Early Life, covered three. One would think that Rushdie’s exile would have given him time to think hard about, say, the relationship between politics and literature or the vagaries of fate. Rushdie offers, however, no insight, not even about his own time spent underground: the extensive police protection he received here becomes largely a matter of cataloguing the various Jaguars, BMWs, and Range Rovers in which Rushdie was chartered around at taxpayers’ expense; pointless stories like his account of a feud with Martin Amis that lasted only a single day, or his much longer (and more public) exchange of hostilities with John le Carré, take up scores of pages, and are treated with equal significance. Elsewhere he moos at length about politics (“He chose to believe in human nature, and in the universality of its rights and ethics and freedoms”), fiction (“Literature tried to open the universe”), and human nature (“heterogeneous not homogenous”). In the book’s final chapter he compares himself to Ovid, Mandelstam, and Lorca in the space of a single paragraph.

This book has already come in for multiple drubbings, most notably by Zoë Heller in the December New York Review of Books.  Too little, one thinks, and too late. Books like Joseph Anton are the rule, not the exception, in the Rushdie oeuvre. Where were the Zoë Hellers of the world when Rushdie published The Moor’s Last Sigh or Shalimar the Clown? Why is it a literary sin to be orotund or mawkish in a memoir but not in a novel? Many writers whose fiction I can’t stand have written very good autobiographies; in fact, a distinctly flashy novelist usually makes a point of unplugging the wah-wah pedal and dialing down the overdrive for the memoirs: see Anthony Burgess’ plainspoken (if somewhat fescennine) Confessions. In Rushdie’s case, I sat down at the table expecting, well, not much, but certainly something more appetizing than this cold, overspiced spring navarin.