SOURCE: Siegel, Lee. “Wild in the Streets.” Los Angeles Times Book Review (2 September 2001): 3-4.

In the following review, Siegel identifies Saul Bellow's Mr. Sammler's Planet and F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby as textual inspirations for Rushdie's Fury.

Art critic Clement Greenberg once described someone as being “stupid as a painter.” Painters consider his remark high praise. For them, Greenberg meant to say that because artists' very viscera are lined with thought, they don't need to think their way to the truth. Artists' instincts do the driving; their minds catch up later. Interpretation comes later too, in the eye of the spectator. Yet the real meaning of a painting cannot be articulated in any language other than the idiom of brushstroke and paint.

In this sense, Salman Rushdie is a stupid novelist, as opposed to, say, the highly reflective Saul Bellow or Milan Kundera. Just as Jackson Pollock's...