SOURCE: Wood, James. “Escape to New York.” New Statesman 130, no. 4554 (10 September 2001): 49-51.

In the following review, Wood finds Fury to be a pretentious, outdated apologia.

Fury exhausts all negative superlatives. It is a novel that is indeed likely to make even its most charitable readers furious and that could hardly be worse if a secret committee bent on discrediting Salman Rushdie had concocted it. It is also, among other things, a flailing apologia, telling the story of an Indian professor, Malik “Solly” Solanka, who has recently left his English wife of 15 years, and their three-year-old son, and flown from London to Manhattan. Professor Solanka, who has made a lot of money by inventing and marketing a puppet, comes to America desperate to erase his past, to start over again, and to bury the guilt he feels not only about his separation but about a moment of “fury”, in...