American Book Review

Quichotte (pronounced key-shot) stirs up endless questions as Rushdie's fiction mirrors 2020 world events: the Black Lives Matter movement has blasted the lid off of racism in America and worldwide as targeted violence against non-whites makes headlines. In another direction, drug companies who bribe doctors to overprescribe opioids are being prosecuted: John Kapoor is the first drug company CEO convicted of criminal schemes to induce doctors to hook patients on an addictive form of fentanyl and Purdue Pharma has pleaded guilty and paid eight billion dollars—but so far no Sackler family members have been jailed. (Because they are white?) Quichotte fictionalizes Kapoor and addresses the big story that opioid suicide and overdose deaths in the United States have risen from 21,000 in 2010 to 70,237 in 2017, according to CDC and the NIH (National Institute on Drug Abuse) statistics. Enter Miss Salma R, a strong-willed Indian ex-pat and TV host who becomes a fentanyl addict.

Rushdie's cautionary yet hopeful metafiction cloaks hard truths about racism and addiction in America in a tale purportedly written by a second-rate writer named Sam DuChamp or Brother, who explains it this way to his son:

He tried to explain the picaresque tradition, its episodic nature, and how the episodes of such a work could encompass many manners, high and low, fabulist and commonplace, how it could be at once parodic and original, and so through its metaphoric roguery it could demonstrate and seek to encompass the multiplicity of human life.

Sam's quest novel opens with allusions to Cervantes' 1505 Don Quixote, a saga in which the main character parodies those whose fantasies exceed their capabilities. First, a rambling monologue introduces the inner thoughts of Sam's fictional character Ismail Smile, who selects his own name Quichotte after remembering listening, as a boy, to his father's vinyl recording of the Jules Massenet opera Don Quichotte. In writer Sam's parallel "real" universe, his son has rejected both birth parents, now leads a cult, and wears an "original" mask from Man of La Mancha, the 1965 musical set in a prison where the fictional Cervantes is writing a fictional Don Quixote. Sam's son, or the Son of Sam, is a creepy loner involved in unspecified cult and cyber-spy activities as his character is introduced.

The main characters in the novel, both good and evil, come from Bombay or other locations in India, but all are now American citizens with varied careers: Sam is a mystery writer who invents Ismail Smile, a traveling salesman who works for his rich cousin Dr. R. K. Smile, who runs the highly profitable Smile Pharmaceuticals, Inc., a company pushing a fentanyl sublingual spray. Dr. Smile's wife Happy Smile delights in being an arts patron and helping others. Salma R., a cinema star in India who moved to New York in her mid-twenties and starred in the Five Eyes spy series, now hosts a popular TV talk show. Smile is a huge Salma fan and addicted to watching TV in general when he's on the road selling drugs. Human Trampoline is Smile's sister in New York; her story has parallels with that of Sam's sister in London. These two women are sensible, have some of the best lines, and their personalities are not as inflated as the men's. Many parallel situations in the lives of Sam the writer and Quichotte have different outcomes but start with each being estranged from his son and sister, embracing a dual American-East Indian identity, and facing unprovoked racist incidents due to their brown skin and features.

Ismail Smile, the tall, slender, older East Indian main character, reminds readers of the character Ishmael who opens Melville's Moby Dick (1851)—the only survivor of a captain's insane whale hunt. But Ismael uses an Americanized version of his Indian name, calling himself Smile Smile. Smile's cousin Dr. R. K. Smile is a charming con man who boasts he...