SOURCE: Mishra, Pankaj. “The Emperor's New Clothes.” New Statesman and Society 128, no. 4431 (9 April 1999): 42-5.

In the following negative review, Mishra asserts that “with its banal obsessions and empty bombast, its pseudo-characters and non-events, its fundamental shapelessness and incoherence, The Ground beneath Her Feet does little more than echo the white noise of the modern world.”

Early in Salman Rushdie's new novel, [The Ground beneath Her Feet,] the narrator, a photographer called Umeed Merchant, confesses to having once believed the “world to be unworthy of me”. It makes you pause. By then you have already been run a bit ragged by his self-important, all-knowing, portentous voice, and are becoming anxious about his intention to give us, as the blurb puts it, nothing less than “the whole of what is and what might be”. Merchant has been going on, among other things, about the advantages of expatriation. He has been...