Early on in Step Across This Line, Salman Rushdie dishes about rock ’n’ roll. He’s been on stage with Bono, and tells us that “the audience at the average book reading is a little smaller… and stage-diving is discouraged. Even at the very best book readings, there are only one or two super-models dancing at the mixing desk.” He’s danced with, and been bitched out, by Van Morrison: “It’s possible that my pogoing wasn’t up to his exacting standards.” Anton Corbijn snapped a photo of Rushdie wearing Bono’s sunglasses. Despite the criticisms he dismisses, like columnists sniping that U2 gains “borrowed intellectual ‘cred’” from star-struck Rushdie, his message is clear enough. Salman Rushdie has arrived.

This all comes from a writer who continually exceeds our expectations. It's not just the partying like, and with, rock stars, although that counts as something coming from a fiftyish author -- shouldn't this guy just keep himself behind his typewriter? It's his writing itself, when he's at his best: brilliant, both fantastic and deeply humane. It's the recognition he's achieved for that writing: Midnight's Children won the Booker of Bookers, voted the best novel of any honored in the history of the competition. And, certainly not least, he's exceeded anyone's expectation of his life expectancy by outliving the Ayatollah Khomeini's 1989 fatwa.

Unfortunately, it's the last of these things that has defined Rushdie's career, at least for the past decade. His writing, and indeed his life, has been overshadowed by the unintended consequences of the "Rushdie affair." He has, paradoxically, become a public figure because of his seclusion, and a persona has been imposed on him by the terms of a death sentence. That this has made Rushdie a symbol for free speech is unsurprising, and that he's used his notoriety as a bully pulpit is laudable. But by adopting this one-note activist's persona, Rushdie has become a more interesting public figure than he is a writer.

Step Across This Line illustrates, probably unintentionally and in frustrating detail, the last decade's struggle between celebrity-Rushdie and writer-Rushdie. The book itself is inconsequential; as a collection of various nonfiction writings from the last 10 years, it's just a desk-clearing volume. It binds together a handful of syndicated New York Times columns, a couple of speeches, the text of a British Film Institute pamphlet, various pieces from British newspapers and a long autobiographical account of Rushdie's years under the fatwa. The picture that emerges from these fragments steadily narrows in focus and flattens in perspective; as Rushdie's persecution extends, his topics and his voice become increasingly authoritative and political, more concerned with abstract issues of human rights than the minutiae of human experience.

Certainly, the best writing comes at the beginning. The very first essay, on The Wizard of Oz, shows a thoughtful critic approaching a resonant and much-loved movie. It's a testament to Rushdie's skill that the piece serves both as a window on its author and an exploration of the movie, and can be read both for Rushdie's sake and for the film's. Rushdie displays careful research and considerable attention, discussing the saga of production and providing frame-by-frame readings of some scenes. He shows remarkable erudition in transforming the film from mass-market entertainment to postmodern art, without sucking the life from the picture. And he delivers a reading of the film that stresses fantasy and exile, a reading which seems both deeply felt as well as remarkably apt.

There are poor pieces here, too, as is inevitable in such a hodgepodge; for each piece that dissects the politics of the British literary scene cogently, there's an essay in response to some forgotten question or unsupplied reference. And then there's Rushdie on popular music and celebrity culture -- subjects that, as The Ground Beneath Her Feet showed, are unseemly and embarrassing on him. Star-gazing and name-dropping aside, though, Rushdie's prose continually demonstrates his brilliance.

The trouble with Step Across This Line, then, is that Rushdie-the-writer so often cedes control. For the bulk of the book, the primary voice belongs to Rushdie-the-victim, and increasingly, Rushdie-the-crusader. His prose is always clean, his images often striking, his discussions invariably firm and clear. But much of the book consists of standard left-liberal op-ed writing, hardly the stuff to stretch a prose stylist. And so much of Rushdie's editorializing depends, not on the strength of the writer's voice or the perspective of the singular artist, but on his public persona. Rushdie's experiences give him a celebrity and a credibility impossible to refute. But Rushdie's talent, hidden here behind that façade, gave the reason to listen in the first place.

Salman Rushdie reads Thu., Oct. 10, 8 p.m., $12, Free Library of Philadelphia, 19th and Vine sts., 215-567-4341.