On Quixotic Quests (Salman Rushdie's latest novel)

When I first heard about Salman Rushdie's Quichotte (2019) being promoted as a journey into contemporary America, I knew that I wanted to reach for the book eventually. 

At the time, I was working on an article about Gary Shteyngart's Lake Success, which is also a road novel to a certain extent, and I was interested to know how the two novels would compare. 

While Shteyngart's novel depicts present-day America just before Donald Trump's election to president in 2016,  Rushdie's meditation on contemporary US is made universal through the author's skillful use of the quest motif. The novel's protagonist, an Indian ex pharma rep addicted to television, is a modern-day Quichotte who embarks on a journey across America to win the love of his own Dulcinea: Salma R, an Indian Oprah, suffering from childhood trauma and bipolar disorder, which she assuages with powerful opioids. In his quest, Quichotte is accompanied by his version of Sancho, a teenage son whom he dreams into existence but who, just like the whole novel,  keeps hovering between the real and the imaginary.

Conveniently, when travelling towards Salma, Quichotte is asked by his ex-employer  to supply her with the illegal drug. In the meantime,  the world around is tumbling into chaos and destruction. White supremacism is on the rise and Quichotte and Sancho's brown skin is the target of racial slur and violence At one point, they witness an Asian man being shot dead by a drunken supremacist. 

As the world around is becoming more unnerving,  the balance between reality and imagination is increasingly disturbed. Time and space are not to be relied on anymore as both stretch and expand to accommodate the unbelievable: an imaginary town where, in a manner reminiscent of Eugene Ionesco's play, people have been transforming into mastodons, a bilingual cricket straight from Pinocchio, or a Requiem-for-a-Dream-like TV which speaks directly to Quichotte. 

If Quichotte's story is an intricate mechanism oiled by intertextual references, the novel's structure is a veritable Russian doll. Following Cervantes, Rushdie builds a rich metafictional work, where Quichotte's story turns out to be the creation of a novelist who mirrors his character's life story on his own biography, including a strained relationship with his cancer-ridden sister who takes her own life with a lethal drug he himself provides. The  parallels explored in the novel become even more uncanny when one remembers that Rushdie's younger sister died of opioid addiction. 

The novel is a testimony to Rushdie's mastery as an author.  Although initially the many threads of the novel may seem disconnected, in time they become beautifully intertwined. In its totality, Quichotte is at once contemporary and timeless, providing an accurate diagnosis of ailing America, but also a more universal reflection on love, family and the art of writing.