SOURCE: King, Bruce. Review of The Ground beneath Her Feet, by Salman Rushdie. World Literature Today 74, no. 1 (winter 2000): 161.

In the following review, King provides a mixed assessment of The Ground beneath Her Feet.

The blurb proclaims The Ground beneath Her Feet as Salman Rushdie's “most ambitious and accomplished novel, sure to be hailed as his masterpiece.” Ambitious is correct. Rushdie's method is to place fabulous and improbable private lives on a large historical set as a metaphor for political and cultural events. Here the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice is retold as two Indian lovers who become international rock stars symbolic of recent Western and postcolonial culture. This is Rushdie's New World novel, half of it set in New York, with some major events in Mexico. It is not Rushdie's masterpiece, but it is his most accessible and likely to be his most popular novel. It is understandable...