Quichotte

The premise of this novel appeals to fans of metafiction and Salman Rushdie. A spy thriller writer, Sam DuChamp, turns his attention to a more literary story—a picaresque novel about Ismail Smile — a traveling salesman of pharmaceutical products. Smile falls in love with a TV-host star, and travels across America on quest to win her love. Meanwhile, Smile conjures up a son, Sancho, who begins to have a life of his own, slowly moving from the imaginary world to the world of flesh and blood. 

Like a 19th century novel, each chapter begins with a helpful summary as subtitle (e.g. Chapter One: Quichotte, an old man, falls in love, embarks on a quest & becomes a father). Chapter Two introduces the author of the character Quichotte – Sam DuChamp, and so the layering of the fictional world begins. So far, so good. When introducing DuChamp, however, the narrator highlights DuChamp’s fictional status (“we will call him Brother” p.21). Then there is the unsettling instability of the text's epistemology.  The narrator lays it out for the reader soon after introducing DuChamp: 

'Perhaps this bizarre story was a metamorphosed version of his own. Quichotte himself might say, if he were aware of Brother (which was impossible, naturally) that if fact the writer’s tale was the altered version of his story, rather than the other way around, and might have argued that his ‘imaginary’ life added up to the more authentic narrative of the two (p.22).'

The phrase ‘impossible, naturally’ ironically passes over the already introduced notion that DuChamp is also a fictional construct. At first, the DuChamp narrative appears to be the more stable one, as we might expect it to be, drawing on real-world concepts like an estranged Brother and Sister (a sister suffering from cancer) while mastodons rampage in the streets of Berenger in the Quichotte chapters. However, the two narratives continue to interact in unexpected ways. Brother’s real son (if we can say this) is in trouble with the American government and has been wearing a Don Quixote mask, threatening cyber-interventions. The agent investigating Brother’s son has been reading DuChamp’s work in progress, and says: ‘I’m no critic, sir, but I estimate that you’re telling the reader that the surreal, and even the absurd, now potentially offer the most accurate descriptions of real life’ (p.222). There is also the simpler fact that Quichotte and his quest dominates the novel, right up to the end, where the Author sees two figures of his imagination crossing between ‘Fancy into the Author’s real world’ (p.390). 

As a fan of Paul Auster and Peter Carey and Don Delillo, I very much enjoy the narrative games authors of metafiction use to make serious points about the world we live in. In this case, however, I must admit that it was more of a struggle for me to stay engaged throughout. The fault is likely my own: I read the novel late in the evenings and my attention wandered. Perhaps if I had read faster I might have kept up better. There are many other things to notice, however, of a more grounded nature. The novel has been described in terms of its satirical take-down of a crumbling American dream, with a focus on the widespread abuse of opioids, and the Trump-era blending of truth and lies, fiction and fact. More troubling is Rushdie’s fictional representation of end-of-world matters, with places disappearing from the map, and a corporation NEXT looking to abandon Earth for an alternate, parallel world, through a mysterious portal. This all reminded me of stories of the ultra-rich prepping real estate in New Zealand, and android-like billionaires bent on Mars missions as an escape hatch, flashed forward. 

Despite all of its fun and games, Rushdie’s novel is about the world we live in now. His literary play with Cervantes both entertains, and deeply disturbs, as important fiction of this type must.