When Midnight's Children appeared a few years ago, Salman Rushdie was "admitted to the ranks," as critics say, of the world's great writers, and those who did the admitting wrote as if a South American writer was suddenly born in the subcontinent. Rushdie seemed condemned to be always compared to García Márquez, and more generally to that kind of inflammation of the imagination, that tropical expressionism, to which a lot of literary taste has surrendered. Magic realism is its latest label. Rushdie surely shares its phantasmagoric ways, its interest in the knowledge that is turned up by delirium, its visionary violence, its appetite for epic and for epic exaggeration. This new novel will show, however, that the acclaim was only approximate. The shock of Shame lies in its fidelity to reality. It is a moderately distorted report on a world that is already deranged. This great...