Salman Rushdie’s New Novel Is Stuck in the ’90s

One fatwa, three decades in varying degrees of hiding, 21 books, 15 stab wounds, a murdered translator, and an appearance on Curb Your Enthusiasm later, Salman Rushdie has not lost his innocence. Rushdie’s new novel, Victory City, has a certain flinty fun to it. Written before an assassination attempt in western New York state by an American Islamist that left the author on a ventilator and cost him an eye, the pages are aglow with sorcery and forest monkeys of different colors and tales of palace intrigue. It also, as the story of the rise and fall of an empire and the political fortunes in between, contains Rushdie’s political philosophy—his theory of what makes a society work and what makes one fail.