Salman Rushdie is sitting at the desk of Rabbi Judith Lazarus Siegal sipping Grey Goose vodka. This seems the wrong thing to do in a Jewish temple, but apparently it isn’t: another rabbi drops by to suggest that he gets his juicer and we make daiquiris. The author politely declines: he takes his vodka neat. It’s a literary thing. “Vikram Seth apparently likes a clear drink in his glass too when he gives readings,” says Rushdie, “though in his case I believe it’s gin.”
Rushdie is waiting in Rabbi Siegal’s office at the Temple Judea in suburban Miami to give a reading. It’s the 25th date of a 29-city US book tour to promote his new novel, The Enchantress of Florence. The original bookshop venue was too small for the crowd they are expecting. “After J.K. Rowling, I guess I’m the biggest literary turn from the UK,” he says. Tomorrow night he will be in Milwaukee, then Chicago then Madison, Wisconsin. Each night, it is the same deal: a 20-minute reading and then some Q and A. “It used to be an hour of reading, but there isn’t the patience for that anymore.”
Questions, he says, recur. Any tips for young writers? Does he consider himself, as an Anglo-Indian novelist, to be subverting the Eurocentric literary canon? What’s the deal with that whole fatwa thing? Rushdie will be glad when it’s over. “I have always thought,” he says, “the secret purpose of the book tour is to make the writer hate the book he’s written. And, as a result, drive him to write another book.”
That secret purpose is working on Rushdie. Later this month, he will start writing a new novel. “I’m thinking of writing a children’s book. My younger son is 11, which is the age my older son was when I wrote a book for him, so now Milan is saying: ‘Where’s my book?’”
I don’t believe Rushdie hates book tours. He gets a buzz from all this. He likes how, on the way to the reading, a Costa Rican bellhop called George shakes his hand firmly and says it’s a great honor to meet a “real, live genius.” Who wouldn’t? He loves doing the jokey warm-up routine before the reading. He probably isn’t disappointed that in the front row are lots of women clutching copies of his book that they yearn to get signed later. Why shouldn’t Rushdie revel in this approval after spending the best part of his literary career under a very real threat of being murdered?
He even seems to get a weird kick from signing books. “You know what,” he told me earlier as we rode the lift down from his hotel suite on the 32nd floor, “I beat Jimmy Carter in his home state.” How so? “I signed 475 copies in an hour when I was in Atlanta. But that was nothing. In Nashville, I signed 1,000 copies in an hour, which I think is a record.”
And there is more to celebrate. He has just won an award called the Best of the Booker to mark the 40th year of the Booker prize. Confusingly, it is the third time he and his novel Midnight’s Children have been honored with a Booker-related gong.
In 1981, the post-colonial, postmodern magical-realist novel about the birth of India and the death of the British Raj won the Booker prize, catapulting Rushdie to fame and enabling him to quit his job in an ad agency.
The book became a global bestseller. “I got a £1,500 advance.” That’s rubbish, I suggest. “I know. I fired my agent.”
In 1993, to celebrate the Booker prize’s 25th year, Midnight’s Children was chosen as the “Booker of Bookers” by a jury of three former chairs of judges. “They included Bill Webb (the former literary editor of the Guardian in London) and Malcolm Bradbury. Malcolm, when he was chair of judges in 1981, had not voted for Midnight’s Children, so go figure.” Go figure: now a resident of New York, Rushdie the cultural chameleon is really mastering those Americanisms.
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