Behind closed doors, family existence is “overblown and operatic and monstrous and almost too much to bear there are mad grandfathers in there, and wicked aunts and corrupt brothers and nymphomaniac sisters.” He praises the “giant belchers” and “breakers of giant winds.” He sees himself as a maximalist in a minimalist world a wet writer in a dry one a lover of bric-a-brac in an era of Shaker modesty.

There is nothing ordinary about ordinary life, Rushdie writes. Rushdie fears that writers no longer trust their imaginations, and that the classroom imperative to “write what you know” has led to dullness, angst and dead ends: cold and bony literary mumblecore. He suggests his work has been misunderstood and mistreated because the literary culture has turned from brio-filled imaginative writing toward the humbler delights of “autofiction,” as exemplified by the work of Elena Ferrante and Karl Ove Knausgaard. In his new book, “Languages of Truth: Essays 2003-2020,” Rushdie attempts to perform a defensive castling move. Tolkien was reading aloud from an early draft of “The Lord of the Rings,” was heard to comment: “Oh, not another elf!” Reading these novels, one begins to feel like the English academic Hugo Dyson who, while J.R.R. They have no middle gear, and no real humans wander through them. These productions feel forced: talky, infelicitous and banal.

His novels are tricked out with genies and tarot cards and magic mirrors and references to things like evil chicken entrails powder and witches and dragon ladies. The rap against Rushdie’s fiction is that it’s become increasingly “magical,” wonder-filled and windy, as if he were typing in turquoise and burnt sienna. The magazine Cahiers du Cinéma once had a rating system that included a black dot for “abominable.” If critics could be handing Rushdie these dots, they would be. Too old to seize a moment, too active to be rediscovered, he’s been subject over the past two decades to some of the unkindest reviews ever delivered to a talent of his magnitude. Yet he finds himself, in his early 70s, deeply out of fashion.

Salman rushdie alias