How do writers privately define success? Is it a matter of sales, prizes, worshipful reviews? Yes, but only that? Are there more idiosyncratic metrics — a conviction in the value of the work or in the risks taken or, perhaps, the knowledge of the cost of its creation?
“What you hope to do is leave behind a shelf of books,” Salman Rushdie once said, quoting Martin Amis. “You want to be able to walk into a bookstore and say, ‘From here to here, it’s me.’”
A shelf of books. One wishes Amis had been more specific. Rushdie fills a shelf, even two, nicely. He is the author of nearly 20 books — six published in the last 11 years alone, but of diminishing quality. The novels are imaginative as ever, but they are also increasingly wobbly, bloated and mannered. He is a writer in free fall. What happened?
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