Salman Rushdie is a selfless defender of artistic freedom. No, he’s really a party animal with a bombshell perpetually on his arm. Actually, he’s hiding in fear. Isn’t he? For the last 23 years he’s been a novelist living the life of a character in a novel. Unfortunately for Rushdie, the book he’s been transported into isn’t a nuanced work of art like, say, “Midnight’s Children,” the epic novel that helped make his reputation as one of the best British writers of his generation. It’s more like “a bad Rushdie novel,” he told me as we sat in the restaurant of a West Hollywood hotel. “The kind of book I’d write if I weren’t any good.”
more from Hector Tobar at the LA Times here.