The Book I Never Read

Many books have changed my life, my worldview, and my perceptions of myself. Paul Monette’s Becoming a Man made me realize I was not alone as a gay teenager. Patti Smith’s Just Kids showed me what the lives of true artists looked like in New York in the late sixties and early seventies. James Joyce’s Dubliners stirred my soul as it helped me see the universal in the particular.

Yet of all the great books that have influenced me over the years, the one that had the most dramatic impact on my life as a young man was also one I never read. I am referring to Salman Rushdie’s 1988 cause célèbre, The Satanic Verses. 

I know this novel employs magical realism to explore themes of immigration, identity, and alienation. I’ve just never read the damned thing. Here is how it affected me anyway.

In the winter of 1989, I was working as a publicity assistant at Viking Penguin (now part of Penguin Random House). It was my responsibility to answer phone calls from all manner of kooks, weirdos, inmates, and fans. I would soon add “terrorists” to that list of callers.

Viking UK had already published Rushdie’s acclaimed novel, and the US team was about to bring it out here. Because parts of the novel are considered sacrilegious, it has inflamed extremists and continued to spark controversy in the Muslim world for over thirty years. In January, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued a fatwa calling for the novelist’s death for committing blasphemy. That is when it all hit the fan.

Those calls I answered, which usually had some humorous aspect to them, suddenly were not funny at all when they involved a series of bomb threats being made to our West 23^rd Street offices. A lowly assistant, I found myself in the crosshairs of an international crisis. Every time the phone rang, I saw a potential continuum between executing my duties and ending up as the featured topic on Nightline. 

Being young and stupid, there were times when -- realizing that most of these threats were empty -- my work friends and I actually came to enjoy receiving the calls. We would get out of work early and retreat to the Irish bar across the street to congratulate ourselves for our bravery in the name of free speech. And for the mission of bringing to the world an embattled masterpiece I hadn’t even read.

The bomb threats went on for months. 

Later on, after I got promoted, my new office shared a makeshift wall with the receiving department. There was a designated area just beyond the wall for newly arrived packages that had not yet been vetted by the FBI’s explosive-sniffing German shepherds. As I worked, package after package was hurled against that shoddy barricade. It all made me a little jumpy.

Salman Rushdie in 2019
Image: Getty

Fast forward to August 2022. Rushdie, who has lived courageously in defiance of the fatwa over the past thirty years, was savagely attacked by a crazed zealot during a speaking engagement at the Chautauqua Institute. He lost his sight in one eye, as well as a decades-long battle with his would-be oppressors. The attempted murder sickened me and brought back the days when I had a personal stake in Rushdie’s creative output and well-being.

Despite all this, I cannot tell you exactly why I still have not read The Satanic Verses, a book that has been in the background of my life’s events for some thirty years. I should have read it by now. I understand it is not a light read and requires considerable exertion. Many see a through-line from this crisis to the tragedy of 9/11.

If I get to it someday, I’ll be sure to let you know. 

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NB: For a future installment of Vertes'Verities, I am asking readers to ask me anything! No question is off-limits. Go ahead -- you know you want to!