Rating: 
Summary: Contrived and disappointing
Review: This is the first novel by Rushdie that I have read, though I am sure it will not be the last. Having never read Rushdie, I was first very impressed with his skill with the written word. His plays on words, his ability to make sentences dance easily justify his reputation as one of the great living authors of in the English language; yet I feel there is something lacking in Fury.The novel paints a very good collection of sympathetic and interesting characters. The protagonist and his dolls and his mid-life/existential/marital crisis. The young, precocious, and unbelievably gorgeous woman who teases him into a great burst of creativity. Masterfully done. But it is the setting of Fury that ultimately makes it a questionable read. Set in New York City in the summer of 2000, Rushdie smothers the narrative with pop-culture references from that season to an amazing degree. References to Hillary Clinton and Mayor Giuliani, to the movies Chicken Run and Gladiator, to an aside about the 'I Love You' computer virus that I had all but forgotten about. Imagine how over peoples heads this read will be in fifteen years time. Which is a shame because if it was tweaked in certain degrees I do believe it could last the test of time like most great literature. But then there goes Rushdie dipping into the realm of Tom Clancy when the novel sways from the tale of a lost middle-aged man to a military revolution on a small island nation in the Pacific. I let the narrative take me along with that one, thinking perhaps it is literary allegory and I should take something from it because this is high modern literature, but somehow I feel it was way over the top for a story that was doing so well as an intimate portrait of a few very interesting characters.
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