Fury by Salman Rushdie

“Garbage trucks like giant cockroaches moved through the city, roaring. He was never out of earshot of a siren, an alarm, a large vehicle’s reverse-gear bleeps, the beat of some unbearable music.”

Salman Rushdie’s first novel on America,based on New York .Malik Solanka, dollmaker extraordinaire, steps out of his life one day, abandons his family without a word of explanation, and flees London for New York. There’s a fury within him, and he fears he has become dangerous to those he loves. He arrives in New York at a time of unprecedented plenty, in the highest hour of America’s wealth and power, seeking to “erase” himself. Eat me, America, he prays, and give me peace.

But New York is chattering about a rash of cult murders, straight out of American Psycho. The killers dress in Disney clothes, bonk their beautiful victims with concrete after bonking them every other way, and scalp them. Malik has alcoholic blackouts and fears he may be a serial killer (“if the knife was possible, so was this“).His own thoughts, emotions, and desires, meanwhile, are also running wild. A tall, green-eyed young blonde in a D’Angelo Voodoo baseball cap is in store for him. As is another woman, with whom he will fall in love and be drawn toward a different fury, whose roots lie on the far side of the world.

Fury is a work of explosive energy, at once a pitiless and pitch-black comedy, a profoundly disturbing inquiry into the darkest side of human nature, and a love story of mesmerizing force. It is also an astonishing portrait of New York.