Fury

The most recent in the list of thrillers featuring Butch Karp and his wife, Marlene Ciampi, involves a savage assault and political hanky-panky, along with a terrorist plot thrown in for good measure. For newcomers, the author spends many pages catching up by summarizing past events. For those familiar with the series this could be tedious. However, Richard Ferrone reads with authority, portraying all the characters in a consistent and realistic style. His accents--Russian, Arabic, African-American--are believable as are his portrayals of women and children. A fine performance, this will maintain the interest of even the most knowledgeable Tanenbaum fans. S.S.R. (c) AudioFile 2006, Portland, Maine

Starred review from July 16, 2001
The sea change has invigorated Rushdie. His new novel is very much an American book, a bitingly satiric, often wildly farcical picture of American society in the first years of the 21st century. The twice transplanted protagonist (Bombay born, Cambridge educated, now Manhattan resident) Prof. Malik Solanka is an unimaginably wealthy man, transformed from a philosophy professor into a BBC-TV star, then into the inventor of a wildly popular doll called Little Brain. Compelled to relinquish control of the doll when it metamorphoses into an industry, the furious Solanka flees London for an apartment on Manhattan's Upper West Side. His prose crackling with irony, Rushdie catches roiling undercurrents of incivility and inchoate anger: in cab drivers, moviegoers and sidewalk pedestrians; in ethnic antagonisms; in political confrontations; and in Solly himself, as he tries to surmount his guilt over having abandoned a loving wife and three-year-old son in England, and as he becomes involved with two new women. Rushdie's brilliantly observant portrait of "this money-mad burg" is mercilessly au courant, with references to George Gush and Al Bore, to Elian and Tony Soprano, and to "shawls made from the chin fluff of extinct mountain goats." The action is helter-skelter fast and refreshingly concise; this is a slender book for Rushdie, and his relatively narrow focus results in a crisper narrative; there are fewer puns and a deeper emotional involvement with his characters. Still, his tendency to go over the top leads to some incredulity for the reader; it's a bit much that short, unprepossessing Solly is a magnet for gorgeous, articulate women, who all tend to speak in the same didactic monologues. On the whole, however, readers will nod in acknowledgement of Rushdie's recognition that "the whole world was burning on a shorter fuse."
Rushdie remains a master of satire that rings true with unsettling acuity and dark, comedic brilliance. Agent, Andrew Wylie. 8-city author tour. (Sept. 11)Forecast:Rushdie has never been so sharply observant of the American psyche and the contemporary scene, and thus so relevant to U.S. readers. His increasing visibility after the isolation of the fatwa years should create a buzz of interest in this novel.

Salman Rushdie, the much praised and prize-winning author, has a gorgeous voice and reads as well as he writes, which is quite a thing to say about someone who writes like Salman Rushdie. Fury, his first deliberately American novel, is not only set in New York, but also deals with such very American preoccupations as popular culture, celebrity, sex, childhood abuse, and society murder. It takes him a while to get his ducks in a row, but when at last it becomes apparent that his subject is not simply the midlife rage of the protagonist Malik Solanka, but the larger and much more terrible Furies, as in the Greek Eumenides, currently loose in the world, it becomes at once brilliant, frightening, more mythic than believable, and yet shockingly entertaining. B.G. (c) AudioFile 2002, Portland, Maine