Even serious and persistent readers often say they can't finish Salman Rushdie's novels. His unfinishability has some obvious causes. Wearyingly encrusted description is the natural mode of the earlier fiction. In Midnight's Children the central character's dog dies, but dogs can't just die in Rushdie: they have to be abandoned on the other side of town, they have to be cursed, they have to be superhumanly loyal, they have to run after their owner's car for miles. Even then they can't just keel over with exhaustion. They have to have their guts explode: 'she burst an artery as she ran and died spouting blood from her mouth and her behind, under the gaze of a hungry cow.' That is an exemplary Rushdie sentence, right down to the presence of the detached observer, the cow who is interested in the dog's death for all the wrong reasons.

LRB 8 May 2008 | PDF Download