Shame is in some small degree a roman à clef about the relationship between Pakistan's last two dictators, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and General Zia ul-Haq, but any clef is strictly secondary to Rushdie's consideration of Pakistan itself as a failed act of the imagination. The country's very name is an acronym, he writes, meant to denote the peoples and regions of its western portion—while ignoring the Bengalis who comprised the bulk of its population until the founding of Bangladesh. That irony makes the country's history grotesque from the start, and yet Rushdie hesitates before assaulting it…. "Is history," he asks, in one of the many passages in his own voice interpolated into, and commenting on, Shame's narrative line, "to be considered the property of the participants solely?" Well, perhaps—but if so, Rushdie can take certain liberties with it, can avoid "the real-life material" that would otherwise "become...