So when news about the theme of Rushdie's new book began to circulate last year, quite a few people were tickled. "The Ground Beneath Her Feet" is a rock 'n' roll novel, and rumor had it that the author had gone on tour with U2 to research it. Not quite, although Rushdie is friends with U2 front man Bono, and the band once pulled the embattled scribe onstage at a concert so that the crowd could cheer their support for him. More to the point, there's nothing anomalous about Rushdie's choice of milieu for the new novel. His work often revels in pop culture, from the kitschy Bollywood film extravaganzas of his native India to American television. In a story from the pre-fatwa collection "East, West," two men caught up in a political tragedy have called each other Chekov and Sulu since their youths, when they first bonded as "Star Trek" fans. Rushdie has even said that the movie "The Wizard of Oz" was his first literary influence.

"The Ground Beneath Her Feet" transposes the Orpheus myth -- a musician's attempt to rescue his beloved from the kingdom of the dead -- into the story of VTO, a '70s rock band located on the cultural spectrum somewhere between the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. Vina Apsara, VTO's singer, and Ormus Cama, its songwriter, are lovers. Vina vanishes in an earthquake that destroys half the Pacific coast of Mexico on Feb. 14, 1989 -- an event that, along with the mammoth success of an Indian rock group, marks the world of "The Ground Beneath Her Feet" as a skewed version of our own: What actually happened on that date was the declaration of the fatwa.

Salon Books talked with Rushdie in the Manhattan offices of his literary agent. He was in New York enjoying an unprecedented amount of freedom and preparing for his first public reading in 10 years.

What made you decide to write a novel about rock 'n' roll?

First of all, I just like it. Secondly, I've known quite a lot of these people over the years, and that gave me some confidence that I could do it without making a fool of myself.

I started out wanting to write a grand-passion love story, a contemporary version of the classical myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. And then I thought: Orpheus is a singer. And I wanted it to be a novel that was very much about the contemporary world. If there was going to be music, I wanted it to allow me to enter into the contemporary easily. If I'd only been trying to write a novel about rock 'n' roll, or about the rock business, it would have been a lot less interesting for me.

What kind of subjects in contemporary history were you pursuing?

Well, for example, the Vietnam War. That was my political awakening -- the protests against that war. It was the first war that was really articulated by rock 'n' roll. Not just that there was protest music, which there was; the war had a soundtrack. Celebrity culture is another example.

Those are such big things, and yet you say you wanted to write a love story, which is such an intimate thing.

What I've always tried to find in my books are points at which the private lives of the characters, and also my own, intersect with the public life of the culture.

Do you think there's something transfiguring in celebrity culture that makes it hard to write about the inner lives of the very famous?

It's very difficult to write about people like that and let readers continue to feel any kind of identification with them. Obviously they still have an interior life, but it becomes so impossible to conceive of them that way. There are great deformations of ordinary life that result from great fame, but I think they're more external. Inside, people can survive. I've known people to whom it happens, and the ones who are very tough and resilient -- the ones who survive it -- actually do manage to retain a human scale inside the madness. But it's difficult.

You must have a sense of how that feels.

I might have had a little bit of it, yes.

What interests you about the connection between personal life and the larger movements of culture?

We can't, nowadays, separate our private lives from the public sphere in the way that Jane Austen's characters could. The public sphere has intruded in our lives, and the old view of a man's character's being his fate seems to me no longer entirely true. Bombs drop on you and don't pause to ask whether you've led a good life. All kinds of things over which we have decreasing amounts of control can affect our fate.

Wasn't that always true?

No, I don't think so. War used to be something you could stand on the nearby hill and watch. Now we have total war; everybody's in it. We have total economics as well. Everything affects everybody. The Malaysian currency shakes, and people around the world are seriously affected. History and our private lives are now wound into each other in a more intimate way than they used to be. And so it's always interesting to me to show the private life against that larger context.

A lot of today's fiction doesn't show that so much. It doesn't attempt to show what it's like to have the media saturating your life and bringing distant events into your living room.

That's true. I think there have been generations of writers -- before the present younger generation, if you like -- who were more historically and politically minded. In America, Pynchon, DeLillo, Mailer and Roth -- all these writers have had very public concerns as well as rich private concerns, and that's the American literature that I've responded to.

I was very friendly with Raymond Carver, a writer of a completely different kind. His writing, of course, didn't ever take on history or politics, but because it was so profound in its understanding of human nature, it didn't matter. So I think those writers that I've admired have often had that public interest as well as the private interest, but not always. I reread "On the Road" at one point when I was writing this book, and I was really surprised at how well it stood up. And you couldn't be less political than "On The Road," really. It's about being a bum.

I think Kerouac thought of it as being a kind of political act.

I know, he did. But he was wrong. But the book, as a book, and as a kind of attitude, really holds up. I was pleased to see that. I hadn't read it since I was 20. I can see why it would appeal to you if you're 20, but it's interesting that it still appealed to me in my 50s. And Hemingway's not good when he's political. He's better when he's talking about bullfighting and girls. In my case, I think it has to do with the fact that I studied history, not literature. Whatever I'm writing about, or whoever I'm writing about, I keep finding history knocking at the door.

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