by JULIET WATERS

At his reading last Friday at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Salman Rushdie was asked if he’d ever thought while he was writing the The Satanic Verses that it would stir up the kind of controversy that would result in the declaration of a Fatwah (which was fortunately lifted in 1998). “No,” he replied, sounding charmingly unrehearsed, given how many times he’s probably been asked this question. To imagine while you’re writing a book that it will spark a call for your assassination, he explained, is a fear he would have considered way too self-important.

And self-important is not something Salman Rushdie should want to come off as these days. Not while promoting a new novel about a charming, famous figure who is assassinated by a Muslim fanatic. And especially not when this novel is being touted by his publisher as a return to form after two critical busts, Fury and The Ground Beneath Her Feet.

To say Shalimar the Clown is a return to form would be misleading. At best it’s a return to subjects Rushdie writes more soulfully and skillfully about than the ones he’s been pursuing recently. It’s a compelling story about a love triangle gone very bad in a world gone even worse. A charismatic Jewish American ambassador to India, Maximilian Ophuls, provokes the vengeance of a Kashmiri actor, Shalimar, when Max seduces Shalimar’s wife. Rushdie’s signature strength, turning personal stories into political allegories, is stronger than it’s been for some time, and his writing about Kashmir and Strasbourg, where Max grew up before the second world war, is moving and entertaining. But Rushdie’s weakness, his obsessive need to write about something that really isn’t deeply rooted in his psyche, American culture, especially American pop culture, is a spectre that continues to haunt his novels.

The Ground Beneath Her Feet, his re-imagination of the history of rock ’n’ roll if it had originated in India, was just plain weird. Fury, a novel set in New York, is a remainder pile bargain for good reason. Shalimar the Clown starts in L.A with cringeinducing references to Star Trek and Ghostbusters that only a committed Rushdie (or maybe Star Trek) fan is likely to endure to get to the passages that resonate with the authority that have made his earlier novels some of the most enduring fiction ever written.

And so we find Rushdie at another frightening crossroads in his career. His writing about Islam was controversial, his writing about America is merely lame. There will be no bounty on his head because America does not punish its writers with threats. It punishes them far more cruelly, with indifference.

In a better world, Shalimar the Clown would not be hyped. It would be read and seen for what it is, a good book, in parts, but perhaps a cry for help. In a better world there would be some kind American cultural priest who could see the danger and act to liberate Rushdie from the sin of revering pop culture more than it deserves, which he so obviously does. I’m not sure who—maybe Owen Wilson or a Farrelly brother. Someone smart, but crazy enough to declare not a Fatwah, rather something more like a Piewah.

It would, of course, be understood that no actual pie should ever actually hit the face of Salman Rushdie. This would be nothing more than an allegorical Piewah. There would be no security guards standing by, armed with paper towels and checking suspicious pastry boxes. This would just be more of an encouragement to consider the possibility that pop culture, no matter how much he likes it, is just not his thing.

And so there must be no more Ghostbusters, no more Star Trek, no more clowning around, Salman Rushdie... Or, I’m telling you, the next time you come here: splat!

Shalimar the Clown by Salman Rushdie, Random House, hc, 416pp, $34.95