If you’ve read Languages of Truth all the way from start to finish, you’ll be feeling bloated (did you really need that extra helping of commencement address?) yet admiring of your insistent, generous host.

Despite its homage to happenstance, a consistent design runs through this miscellany. From the Indian-Persian-Arabic tales of the One Thousand and One Nights to classic American fiction with its 'comedy and tragedy of the reinvented self,' Mr. Rushdie salutes the 'protean' and 'metamorphic' art of change and multiplicity.

I read Rushdie’s arguments with much interest and little agreement, as Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. used to say. He is fencing with a poorly stuffed straw man.

... Rushdie serves up a confused vision of this century, presenting a self-absorbed and exhausted thinker whose eye has been tracking yesterday’s concerns.

Rushdie’s language is in the main broad, his assertions general, and his assumptions sweeping. His enthusiasms are not scholarly but do have the frisson of the eclectic and sometimes the presumptuous. Whether you agree with him or not he is always engaging, mostly interesting. Part of that appeal is this side-stepping of academic rhetoric for the popular and accessible language of the opinionated enthusiast.

Languages of Truth, mingles jokey allusions to Charlie Brown and Eminem with the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus, Franz Kafka and 'my old pal Marianne Faithfull' (the name-dropping is a Rushdie trademark). Included are a couple of addresses Rushdie made to north American university students on their graduation day ('Dear class of 2015'). These are bin-scrapings but Rushdie is eminent enough to merit their inclusion.

With reflections on everything from the rise of autofiction to Trump and Covid, a collection of Salman Rushdie’s 21st-century nonfiction ought to be a treasure trove, but it feels more like watching someone rooting around down the back of the sofa for loose change.

What is the appeal of a collection of essays when its author’s views on many of its topics are already well known? In Rushdie’s case, it is the brio with which he expresses himself. But while Languages of Truth is an opportunity for Rushdie completists to find two decades’ worth of his pieces in one place, it lacks any sense of being a unified work.

Rushdie holds forth in what he once self-deprecatingly called 'a slightly messianic tone', whether he’s writing about Ai Weiwei or remembering Carrie Fisher. Though more than half the book is concerned with writing, there’s a persistent vagueness, a tendency towards platitude, in almost everything he says. He rarely reflects on his own practice—even when staring at an open goal, as in a lecture on his 'beginnings'—and relies instead on eroded touchstones and overplayed anthology moments.

Ravenous for life, stories, freedom, and justice, he is propelled on intellectual journeys between East and West, past and present, fact and fiction, words and image.

Wide-ranging nonfiction pieces by the distinguished novelist, unified by his commitment to artistic freedom and his adamant opposition to censorship in any form.

A mesmerizing collection.