The Ground Beneath Her Feet," Salman Rushdie's seventh novel, is an engrossing, if sometimes maddening, minor masterpiece - a brazen, bombastic journey through the last half century that owes its success to the twisted genius of Rushdie's epic vision.
Touted as "his first novel set largely in the United States," "The Ground Beneath Her Feet" is far too vast to be grounded in one place: Rushdie follows his and his narrator's muse, rock goddess Vina Apsara, wherever she treads. She rumbles around the globe like the earthquake that claims her life, leaving destruction and myth in her wake.
Contemporary mythmaking is Rushdie's ambitious goal, and he turns to the arena that has brought the most transcendent figures of the last 50 years: rock and roll. It may sound hard to swallow that an Indian-American super-group with the decidedly uncharismatic name of VTO and esoteric lyrics that sound a lot like they were written by, um, Salman Rushdie, could captivate the global consciousness to such a degree that it eclipses the Beatles. But the force of the characters' personalities - and the powerful conviction of Rushdie's prose - will convince you.
His living gods, his present-day incarnations of Orpheus and Eurydice - they relive the myth and morph it in fascinating ways - are Ormus Cama (VTO's guitarist-songwriter) and Vina Apsara (lead singer), each emerging from cursed, destructive families, drawn together by love, beauty and otherworldly talent. A side effect is that the supernatural forces of their personalities often repel one another; their relationship consists of brief moments of ecstasy followed by extended, agonizing periods of longing and denial.
And in the interim comes Rai, the adopted name (it means "prince," symbolically, for Rai will remain second in line) of Umeed Merchant, a photographer and lifelong friend of Vina and Ormus - and, at times, Vina's lover. He's also the first-person narrator, analogous in many ways to Rushdie but also to Nick Carraway, documenting the larger-than-life figures at the novel's center - its Jay Gatsby and Daisy Buchanan.
It is from Rai's perspective that the novel begins, with Vina's death: Rushdie takes a fragmented, anecdotal structure, the only way to tell a rock-and-roll story. And it only takes two sentences for the highly charged, painfully funny voice of this unmistakable novelist to assert itself: "On St. Valentine's Day, 1989, the last day of her life, the legendary popular singer Vina Apsara woke sobbing from a dream of human sacrifice in which she had been the intended victim. Bare-torsoed men resembling the actor Christopher Plummer has been gripping her by the wrists and ankles."
Vina's death completes her transformation into a present-day Eurydice, but at this defining moment, Rai takes over the role of Orpheus: He looks away from Vina, and she is never seen by anyone again, swallowed in a helicopter by a massive earthquake. Her parting words become immediately wrenching: "Goodbye, Hope."
After recounting this event, Rai sets out to tell Ormus and Vina's story, and, in doing so, he tells his own as well. Paramount to Rai's perspective is that as a photographer, a freezer of events in time, he is fully grounded in the actual, and when his subjects so often traverse into the supernatural, he brings the reader back to Earth. But he cannot deny that the events of their lives have a resonance that reality cannot explain. He has to believe in the persistence of myth.
For instance, Ormus, on the day of his birth, begins moving his fingers in simulation of a guitarist playing intricate chord progressions. His birthday, May 27, 1937, is one of several symbolically loaded days that serve as a turning points for the ensuing narrative. On the same day, Ormus' five-year-old, fraternal twin brothers, nicknamed Cyrus and Virus, attend a cricket match to watch their father, and he blasts a googly that beans Virus in the forehead, striking him dumb. Meanwhile, Rai's parents meet for the first time, visiting Ormus' mother in the hospital.
They come to offer their condolences, for Ormus also has a fraternal twin brother, Gayomart, who was stillborn. As Ormus discovers later, the infant doesn't go quietly: He slips into another plane of existence. This is Rushdie's most audacious, fascinating conceit: The world of "The Ground Beneath Her Feet" is one slightly off-center from our own, but those blessed with a certain vision, as Ormus comes to be, can see through the collisions between one reality and another - to where the world as we know it exists, and Ormus and his music do not.
The concept of parallel worlds, smashing into one another and occasionally interacting, produces tragedy (earthquakes are a primary symptom of the collisions), but also absurdist humor. To create his alternate universe, Rushdie looks at the musicians of the last 50 years as if through a fun-house mirror: Elvis Aaron Presley becomes Jesse Garon Parker, and British radio in the '60s is dominated by hit records such as "John Lennon singing 'Satisfaction,' the Kinks' 'Pretty Woman,' or 'My Generation,' by the new super-group High Numbers, who changed their name from The Who and immediately made the big time."
Ormus' gift of vision produces the apocalyptic grandeur of his best music but also affirms his status as an outsider. Rock and roll, to Rushdie, is a study of misfit history, the subversive attraction of people who exist outside acceptable social models. As Rai puts it, "in our myths, our arts, our songs, we celebrate the non-belongers, the different ones, the outlaws, the freaks ... Our libraries, our places of entertainment tell the truth."
And Vina is also an outsider, rootless, iconoclastic, born in Chester, Va., of all places, to an Indian-American father and a Greek-American mother. Her childhood takes dramatic, violent leaps that leave her essentially orphaned, and she takes up with relatives in Chickaboom, N.Y., and then Bombay, where Rai first encounters her: "all I could see was her Stars-and-Stripes swimsuit and the white lungi she was wearing over it, tied at the hip."
Such sudden jumping between nationalities ensures that Vina remains the It Girl, embracing popular culture and the sexual revolution, residing entirely in the now. Perhaps this is why she is doomed to be swallowed by competing planes of existence - because she cannot comprehend her status as an outsider. Echoing the novel's title and one of Ormus' most famous songs, Rai cautions, "Look out, Vina. Nymph, watch your step. Beware the ground beneath your feet."
Another outsider is Rushdie himself, seen through the lens of Rai, who leaves India not because he wants to take on the world but because it has taken away everyone he loves and deprived him of options. He offers a moving tribute to his home country, and it's hard not to see the exiled novelist with the fatwa over his head in these words: "India, fount of my imagination, source of my savagery, breaker of my heart. Goodbye."
Unfortunately, these words - and their placement near the middle of the novel - bring out the flaws in its structure, which often comes off as desultory. While the jerky storytelling is often appropriate, Rushdie frustrates the reader by hinting at key developments and then delaying them for hundreds of pages. This is particularly apparent during a long central interlude in London, with Ormus pining away for his lost Vina. We know that they will reunite, form VTO, descend upon America and create music that transcends race and nationality while catapulting them to unprecedented fame, and we want to see how it happens.
Rushdie also tends to end each chapter with a summation, though beautifully written, of the themes developed therein, which draws into question the novel's ability to stand up to a second reading - a test of a truly great work of literature. Still, "The Ground Beneath Her Feet" has extraordinary drawing and staying power. Rushdie is one of the most important writers on the global literary scene, and this novel dares to tread upon fault lines, shatter our preconceptions, and rock our world.
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