around the world; Spanning continents and decades, Salman Rushdie's latest novel follows a dancer, a clown, and a dangerously charming ambassador.(Shalimar the Clown)(Book Review)

Byline: Nell Freudenberger

Early in Salman Rushdie's new novel, Shalimar the Clown (Random House), Max Ophuls, an Alsatian-born hero of the French Resistance and a former American ambassador to India, is driving on L.A.'s Laurel Canyon when he suddenly sees the Himalayas rise up in front of him: "so that the Bentley seemed to be skidding down a spectral ice-valley." As in a Bollywood movie-whose stars are inevitably transported to the mountains for a sexy song and dance-the novel's disparate locales have a way of interrupting one another. Shalimar the Clown leaps from Los Angeles to independence-era Kashmir, to Nazi-controlled Strasbourg and back again to Kashmir at the end of the century, racked by sectarian violence.

Perhaps the least credible of these settings, Rushdie's Los Angeles is a place where the 80-year-old Ophuls (a Nazi refugee like the director of the same name) is a sought-after guest on a late-night TV show, and his gorgeous 24-year-old daughter-a documentary filmmaker and expert archer-is fending off the advances of a famous underwear model. India Ophuls never knew her mother, and she has little patience for her father's legendary charm: Other children, she notes, were "not saddled with names like Herzegovina or Turkey or Burundi just because their ...