In an interview with Una Chaudhri, Rushdie mentioned that the three novels "quoted most often as lying behind Midnight's Children are Tristram Shandy, The Tin Drum, and One Hundred Years of Solitude," and added, "as for other influences, well, Joyce, for a start. And Swift and Sterne," while including Henry Fielding's Tom Jones for its impressive plot. The combination of relatively realistic narrative elements with scenes and characters that stretch the conventional definition of "reality" in the novels that Rushdie identifies as predecessors for his great early work are evident in The Ground Beneath Her Feet. Rushdie's description of Tom Jones as a novel with "this enormous edifice which seems to be so freewheeling, rambling" seems like a general model for his structural approach.

Joyce remains a significant influence on Rushdie "because Joyce shows you that you can do anything if you do it properly," a...