Jitterbug Perfume by Tom Robbins (02/10)

Look, I've joined the culture.

The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy (02/10)

See, Natasha? A woman. With adjectives like "dustgreen" and "mossgreen." On the same page: page 1, in fact. Satisfied?

Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie (02/10)

What author works harder than a young Salman Rushdie? If classic Hollywood cinematography conceals the presence of the camera so that all we see is pure story, artifice folded in on itself like the best of dinner parties, Rushdie is the Soviet auteurs of the 1920s with their frantic montage, the experimenters of the French New Wave with cameras hanging from car windows and trains. (I choose the film metaphor in homage to Rushdie's own cinematic fascination.) Here the effort is so self-consciously obvious that I find it a little annoying, but Rushdie's willingness to spare himself nothing as a writer continues to win me over.

The book bulges gracelessly at the seams. It is several novels--a black satire, a family chronicle, an allegorical fable--smashed together, and some of the fragments fare better than others. The whole midnight children concept seemed underdeveloped, an afterthought--or perhaps Rushdie's first idea, out of which other, better ones grew, and he never brought himself to throw out the original stillborn fetus.