Volume 30, Number 19 · December 8, 1983
Forked Tongue
By D.J. Enright
Shame
by Salman Rushdie
Knopf, 319 pp., $13.95
Tristram Shandy made Sterne famous, and Midnight's Children did the same for Salman Rushdie a couple of years ago. Yet would one want—could one endure—any sort of sequel to Tristram Shandy? A Sentimental Journey is considered no more than a pendant to it, but can Shame, itself the reverse of a sentimental journey, be thought of as a pendant to Midnight's Children? On the whole British reviewers have been grudging in their praise: like second novels, sequels—or what look like them—are notorious objects for carping at. Yet the new novel has all the welcomed virtues of Midnight's Children, and most of the vices (peculiarly hard though these are, in a work whose 'logic' is partly that of the fairy tale, partly that of the nightmare, to separate from the virtues), and it possesses an extra virtue. It is considerably shorter—which, in a writer whose riches are embarrassing, can well indicate a firmer control. Shame is often exasperating, in the way of Günter Grass's best novels, but never (or so I found) to the point of blinding one for long to its sheer power—in horror, humor, slapstick, shrewd wit, and even pathos.
Review, 2591 words
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