In a tour-de-force that is both an homage to an immortal work of literature and a modern masterpiece about the quest for love and family, Booker Prize-winning, internationally bestselling author Salman Rushdie has created a dazzling Don Quixote for the modern age. Inspired by the Cervantes classic, Sam DuChamp, mediocre writer of spy thrillers, creates Quichotte, an ageing travelling salesman who falls in impossible love with a TV star. Together with his imaginary son Sancho, Quichotte sets off on a picaresque quest across America to prove worthy of her hand. Meanwhile his creator, in a midlife crisis, has equally urgent challenges of his own. Just as Cervantes wrote Don Quixote to satirise the culture of his time, Rushdie takes the reader on a wild ride through a country on the verge of moral and spiritual collapse. And with the kind of storytelling magic that is the hallmark of his work, the fully realised lives of DuChamp and Quichotte intertwine in a profoundly human quest for love and a wickedly entertaining portrait of an age in which fact is so often indiscernible from fiction.
When I set out on my quest to read the entire 2019 Booker shortlist, this is one that I was not particularly looking forward to. But a highly skilled synthesis and detailed satirical exploration of modern American society won me over, in the end. There's a lot to pull out here: the insistent denial of real or proper names, the meta recognition of the author as self-insert (Quichotte has the same birthday as Rushdie, which I know because it's also my birthday), the rather searing depiction of Big Pharma's complicity in the opioid epidemic, the thorough exploration of the ways in which racism informs the American (and British) experience... there was a lot here. Rushdie seems to insist that the heart of American culture is rotten, a sentiment that will surely ruffle some patriotic feathers. At less than four hundred pages, it takes true writing talent to work through all of these big ideas in a satisfying, thorough way, but I do feel that Rushdie achieved that. Is the book a little bit smug and self-impressed at times? Yes, but it's still a good read.
