SOURCE: Allen, Brooke. “Mister Multiplicity.” New Leader 82, no. 6 (17 May 1999): 16-17.

In the following essay, Allen notes the excess of showy technique, clever references, and mythological allusions in The Ground beneath Her Feet and contends that the novel lacks depth.

The story of the lyre-player Orpheus and his beloved Eurydice, whose death lured him to the underworld in an attempt to recover her, has retained surprising power through the millennia. Now Salman Rushdie has fashioned a contemporary rock version of the tale in his newest novel, The Ground beneath Her Feet. Rushdie's Orpheus is Ormus Cama, a supernaturally gifted musician and composer whose meteoric career takes him from Bombay to London to New York. Eurydice is an Indian-Greek-American rebel named Vina Apsara, a luscious, raunchy, in-your-face performer with the voice of an angel or, rather, of Love itself.

About midway through his ascent to superstardom, Ormus begins to understand...