Quichotte, an ageing traveling salesman obsessed with the “unreal real” of TV, falls in impossible love with a queen of the screen and sets off to drive across America on a picaresque quest to prove himself worthy of her hand; accompanied, in the passenger seat, by the son he has imagined into being. In Rushdie’s masterpiece, Quichotte’s story is also the story of a deranged time, the “Age of Anything Can Happen,” and deals, along the way, with father-son relationships, sibling quarrels, unf...