Rushdie at his best – Quichotte reviewed

It’s hard to get your head around Salman Rushdie’s latest novel Quichotte, which has been shortlisted for the Booker. It’s a literary embarras de richesse, whose centre can’t really hold, yet it’s written with the brilliant bravura of a writer who can really, really write. More to the point, it’s also funny and touching and sad and oddly vulnerable, rather like its eponymous hero.

His name is taken from Cervantes’ Don Quixote, via its Frenchified version, courtesy of the composer Massenet (one cultural allusion at a time is never enough for Rushdie, whose references range from Prospero to Pinocchio, from Ionesco to Oprah, from Wordsworth to The Wizard of Oz). This Quichotte is an Indian-born immigrant to America, a small-time sales rep for a pharmaceutical company, ageing and down-at-heel, who becomes as addicted to trash TV as Cervantes’ original was to the chivalric romances of his day.

Quichotte’s screen dream is a talk-show star, Salma R, a migrant from Bollywood to Hollywood. Convinced that he can save the world by winning her heart, he embarks, in somewhat Monty Python style, on a quest that takes him on a picaresque road trip across the United States. On the way he is accompanied by Sancho, the son he never had but has called into being by his yearning fantasies.

That, however, is only the start of the postmodern hall of mirrors in which we find ourselves. We soon discover that Quichotte is a fictional invention, created by a character from another, marginally less fictional world. It turns out that the tale of this quixotic quest is being written — even as we read — by a washed-up writer of unsuccessful spy thrillers living in New York, who has decided, as his last stand, to up his game in the high-culture stakes by turning to magical-realist literary fiction.