With his eighth novel, Fury, Salman Rushdie mostly leaves aside the magical-realist leanings of his most well-read work in favor of the sort of smoldering emotional immersion that he first presented in his 1983 history-of-the-subcontinent novel Shame. Fury also abandons Asia for New York City, where Rushdie's protagonist, Malik Solanka, has just moved as the book opens. The Indian-born, Cambridge-schooled Solanka leaves his wife and son in London in the same fashion that he left his position as a history professor years earlier. His hobby is dollmaking, and he's wealthy thanks to one of his creations, a time-traveling philosopher named Little Brain which has been spun off from a late-night TV program into a merchandising bonanza of toys, books, and cartoons. Solanka wanders the streets of New York, free-associating about the pastimes of the nouveau riche, the simultaneous shallowness and relevance of popular culture, the activities of a local serial killer, and the possibility that the scarcely concealed rage dominating the temper of modern times is somehow responsible for the bulk of his generation's creative output. As one of the most dazzlingly discursive prose stylists in contemporary literature—not to mention one of the most plugged-in to current world events—Rushdie excels when he's in full bluster, dropping names from Springsteen to Kieslowski and making connections between recent scientific breakthroughs and the lackluster American elections of 2000. But though Fury is lively and easy to read, it's harder to fully understand. A character study becomes a ponderous murder mystery, then a pat romantic farce, and then a surreal political fantasia in which a science-fiction premise dreamed up by Solanka becomes the basis for a revolution in a Third World country. The novel has a dense thematic structure, full of characters in exile, characters with similar names, characters who look like puppets, and characters who wear masks; Rushdie may be riffing on the loneliness of travelers, or the paralyzing proliferation of choice in the marketplace, or the art of making art. Whatever his purpose, he hasn't arranged his thoughts around any clear plotline. At its best, Fury is an invigorating essay that diagnoses the fever of the current age from an insider's point of view. At its worst, the book is mere babble, as half-baked and self-indulgent as the culture it critiques.