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Bye bye, Miss American Di >> Salman Rushdie's rock 'n' roll icon
by JULIET WATERS
Still, despite his contempt for the public's obsession, Rushdie himself seems to have remained smitten by the mystery of immortal celebrity. Enough so that three years later he's produced a long, brilliant and scathing novel about a female icon who, right from the first paragraph, has some obvious parallels with Di. The Ground Beneath Her Feet opens on the morning of Vina Apsara's imminent death in an earthquake in Mexico on Valentine's Day, 1989. After a terrible nightmare, in which she's being held down by bare-torsoed men who look like Christopher Plummer, she wakes up in a hotel room with a recently acquired lover--the playboy heir of a well-known construction baron who owns the hotel. At 44, Vina is not a princess but an established rock goddess, notorious for her attitude, her independence, promiscuity and flakiness. News of her death will spark a Diana-ish wave of grief in a world somewhat like, but also somewhat unlike, our own. A reader not attentive to every detail in this 600-page epic of love, death and rock 'n' roll, might not notice the first signs of things being just a little bit off. For instance, in the opening chapter the headlines about "political unrest in Chiapas smudged the bare soles of her feet." But isn't 1989 about five years early for headlines about Chiapas? As Vina's best friend and lover Rai begins to narrate the story of Vina's life, history becomes progressively warped. JFK survives an assassination attempt in Dallas, though he will be killed a few years later. In the '70s the biggest bestseller is a novel called The Watergate Affair, set in an absurd futuristic world in which Nixon is president. The history of rock in this parallel universe is equally weird. As a teenager in Bombay, Ormus, Vina's lifelong love, musical partner and eventual husband is the first person to hear the tune to "Blue Suede Shoes" in his head. But the first person to record it is a young trucker named Jess Parker (with the help of his manager Tom Presley). John Lennon will be best known for his hit "Satisfaction," the Kinks for "My Generation" and "Pretty Woman." And one of the most influential duos next to Vina and Ormus are two women called Carly Simon and Guinevere Garfunkle. The name of Vina and Ormus' band, meanwhile, is VTO, and (unlike BTO), they are profoundly influential and fiercely feminist. This is only a thumbnail sketch of a complex, rich, hilarious epic that will no doubt cement Rushdie's reputation as one of the greatest social satirists of his time. Yet something that Bengali writer Amitov Gosh said at last week's Blue Metropolis festival holds true: "The greatest difference between British, American and Indian writers is probably that Indian writers aren't afraid of emotion... Although I would make an exception for Rushdie, there's something about his writing that somehow lacks affect." The Ground Beneath Her Feet isn't hurting for challenging and brilliant insights about the human race. But there's something strangely untouchable about these larger than life characters, making the experience of reading this novel roughly comparable to intense but loveless sex. The earth moves, but somehow the heart remains paralyzed.
The Ground Beneath Her Feet by Salman Rushdie, Knopf, hc, 575pp, $34.95
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A few weeks after the death of Princess Diana, Salman Rushdie wrote a short, brilliant and scathing thought piece for The New Yorker about the hypocrisy of British society. Only a few months before, Brits had been outraged by David Cronenberg's Crash and the idea of people getting off on car accidents. Now they were lining up in a surreal orgy of mourning, unable to let go of the mangled body of a woman they didn't even know.