Early in the book, we are told that Solanka has decided on "using the material of his own life and immediate surroundings and, by the alchemy of art, making it strange." The Russian Formalists and other proponents like Brecht called this aesthetic principle "the alienation effect," or estrangement. You do not need a degree in psychoanalysis to see that the estrangement that really propels Fury is of another sort. We usually call it divorce.

The failure in love gives fury to Malik Solanka's life and the lives of the others around him. Solanka's best friend, Jack Rhinehart, is a journalist. After we have been told that his refrigerator is stocked with "larks' tongues, emus' testicles, dinosaurs' eggs," we are also told that he has stopped writing meaningful journalism. Instead of visiting the war zones, Jack has begun writing "lucrative profiles of the super-powerful, super-famous, and super-rich." He has turned to writing novels that chronicle the loves, the misdeeds, the sexual practices, the cars, of the rich. These novels are about "the lives of today's Caesars in their Palaces." The reason that Jack has started writing this trash is that his exotically beautiful, estranged wife has been squeezing him for money. The "long, languid, pale" Mrs. Rhinehart has "the sticking power of a leech."

It took me a while to see that the book I was holding in my hand pretty much matched the description of Jack's writing. But even after I had finished reading the novel, I could not decide whether Rushdie was publicly venting his fury about what he thought had led to a degradation in art or, in a way that was equally disturbing, was simply seeking to justify the book he had now written about the subject. Fury aims at providing, it would be polite to assume, social satire. But it suffers from what Solanka in another context calls "tragedy of insulation." The story remains bound up in the persona of the protagonist, who appears utterly complicit in what he wants to lampoon. And, in our hero's view, the rulers are brutal, and the ruled, brutish. That leaves us with the garrulous Solanka and his dream girl, Neela, whose sole specialty seems to be to induce whiplash in passing males. This is not enough even to salt the satire.

By the time the novel comes to an end, we find that Solanka's dolls have begun to strut on the global stage. His Puppet Kings, stories about a mad cyberneticist, a drowning planet, cyborgs and lotus eaters, have been put on the web. Suddenly they are all the rage in the hyperlinked universe, perhaps only because everyone who plays the game can become a little Malik Solanka. A little brain. We learn that the dolls have inspired a rebellion on the Fiji-like island of Lilliput-Blefuscu, a rebellion that goes horribly wrong. But by then the reader is weary of art's (read Rushdie's) ambition to inspire world revolutions or, at least, global commercial success. You begin to wish that Rushdie would be content with U2 singing his songs, enjoying the rush of stepping up at Wembley Stadium to have "80,000 fans cheering you on." Here, in these pages [July 9], Rushdie wrote of a photo from that evening: "There I am looking godlike in Bono's wraparound Fly shades, while he peers benignly over my uncool literary specs. There could be no more graphic expression of the difference between our two worlds."

Yes, the difference... But, who am I to now remind Rushdie of that?

The difference between a tabloid celebrity and a serious writer is not so much worth addressing. It is more useful, I think, to ponder the ironies of a self-professed leftist author writing novels that, despite the invocation of deeply democratic themes, are fundamentally undemocratic. I am being harsh. Yet I cannot find better terms to describe writing that is so possessed of a zeal for self-glorification. Equally bothersome, Rushdie's attention to small, ordinary lives is in a pronounced way abstract, uncaring and even hostile. On June 8 last year, he wrote a sympathetic Op-Ed column in the New York Times in which he pleaded for the acceptance of Fiji's Indians as Fijians. In Fury, an analogous group is inexplicably, far too easily, turned into a murderous military force led by a psychotic, megalomaniacal swine.

There might be a moral here for the academic Marxism of classrooms and fashionable literary salons; the less doubtful lesson is about postcolonial literature itself. That literature cannot be strengthened by gestures--Rushdie has been exemplary in this regard, standing up for progressive causes and writers' rights--but by the evidence of the writing itself. In this regard, it is not the leftist writer Rushdie but the rightist V.S. Naipaul, recently awarded the Nobel Prize in literature, whose work returns us to an engagement with the roots of writing and, through that process, the narrative of individual struggles and the geography of marginalization.

Despite his railings against "half-formed societies," you discover in Naipaul repeated tributes to small beginnings and small triumphs. And, instead of the Las Vegas feel that mars Rushdie's fiction, in Naipaul you get a record of the hurt of human failure. For the reader, there is no escape from being reminded of Naipaul's origins--in a family that had barely climbed out of indentureship in a plantation economy in far-off Trinidad. As in A House for Mr. Biswas, what we are offered is a classic account about heartbreaking achievement and the daily, tragicomic routine of unacknowledged lives.

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