Mr Rushdie has reached a comfortable level of writing and this book is too safe to be unique or interesting.

Salman Rushdie's setting for The Golden House is somewhat unexpected; a quiet garden bounded by mansions in the toniest part of Manhattan. Rene, the son of immigrant professors living on the Garden, is fascinated by his mysterious neighbours, the Goldens. Nero Golden, a mysterious patriarch from another country, lives there with his sons: autistic Petya, artistic Apu and gender-confused D. As Rene gets to know the Goldens he becomes obsessed with making a film about their story, a film hampered by the fact that he does not yet know where this story leads.

The fragile tensions in the Golden house approach breaking point when Vasilisa, a Russian chancer, sweeps Nero off his feet and inveigles herself into the house as his mistress. The sons' worst fears about Vasilisa are confirmed, but they are unable to stop her. Things move from bad to worse, and the Golden house becomes the scene of an unfolding grand family tragedy.

With an outsider's view of tragedy among the ultra-rich, this book reminded me of The Great Gatsby, a novel which Rushdie alludes to regularly here. There are a host of other allusions here, notably comparing the 2016 Presidential election to a cartoon stoush between The Joker and Bat-Girl. Rushdie has some trenchant things to say about what that election means.

I initially thought that an upper Manhattan setting was not what I expected from Rushdie, but this scenario gives him the opportunity to make some observations about life in exile, even in the midst of comfort, that are clearly informed by his own experience.

I have tried to read Salman Rushdie on and off over years, but I have never been able to get far in his books. I appreciate the skill of his writing but afraid it's just too pretentious and 'difficult' for me to get anything out of it. Sadly, I was unable to get through this one either.

Author does a good job of integrating real-life America - its culture, its politics ( (Trump, in particular) - into the story, but at times the story drags. Let's move on, I found myself thinking. Resolution was too slick for my taste.

"In these our cowardly times, we deny the grandeur of the Universal, and assert and glorify our local Bigotries, and so we cannot agree on much. In these our degenerate times, men bent on nothing but vainglory and personal gain— hollow, bombastic men for whom nothing is off-limits if it advances their petty cause— will claim to be great leaders and benefactors, acting in the common good, and calling all who oppose them liars, envious, little people, stupid people, stiffs, and, in a precise reversal of the truth, dishonest and corrupt. We are so divided, so hostile to one another, so driven by sanctimony and scorn, so lost in cynicism, that we call our pomposity idealism, so disenchanted with our rulers, so willing to jeer at the institutions of our state, that the very word goodness has been emptied of meaning and needs, perhaps, to be set aside for a time, like all the other poisoned words, spirituality, for example, final solution, for example, and (at least when applied to skyscrapers and fried potatoes) freedom. "

Salman Rushdie’s mid-career novels, the Ground Beneath Her Feet and Fury were, in my view, not even close to the standard of his earlier works, and I know several fellow readers rather gave up on him at that point. But, as someone who persisted, Shalimar the Clown was powerful (and remains significantly underappreciated, largely as interest had diminished), The Enchantress of Florence delightful if somewhat whimsical, and Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights a wonderful story about the power of stories.

I concluded my review of the latter (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1639040228): “but trademark mannerisms aside, Rushdie is one of our finest writers, and the novel also showcases his wonderfully fertile imagination and his exuberant and yet erudite prose.”

Or as the narrator of Golden House puts it:

'I offer this brief CV now so that the reader may feel in good hands, the hands of a credible and not inexperienced storyteller, as my narrative acquires what will be increasingly lurid characteristics..'

Unfortunately if Shalimar the Clown was a stunning return to form Golden House is a severe relapse. Rushdie is always simultaneously entertaining and frustrating but here the scales, at least for me, tipped the wrong way.

The Golden House contains far too many topics I don’t really care about, but more generally important, ones when Rushdie really has little to add but where he seems to have felt obliged, by his (deserved) status as a Great Novelist to opine.

In terms of where I had little interest, Rushdie very effectively uses the Rear Window-esque device of having his narrator, René Unterlinden, being something of a voyeur into the lives of the family of Nero Golden. He then takes a meta-fictional approach, where René is himself writing a fictionalised version on what he sees: except Rushdie decided it would be more effective / original to have René be making a film rather than a book:

'For a while I went along with [him being a writer] and suddenly I woke up and thought that’s a terrible idea. It would be better for him to be anything else — a dentist, an accountant, anything, so I thought, okay, he’s not a writer, so what is he? And the minute the idea that he was a filmmaker showed up it actually released something in the writing of the book'(see http://www.thehindu.com/books/interview-with-salman-rushdie-on-the-golden-house/article19600953.ece).

As the narrator says, it’s an interesting attempt to 'maybe mix up the genres, be a little genrequeer' (that word the first sign of Rushdie foraying into areas he would have been better leaving alone) but it means that while literary references are certainly present, the novel is really aimed more at film buffs than book fans, with the narrative dominated by recollections and reflections of movie scenes (almost none of which I have seen).

This also feels like an attempt to write that mythical thing Great American Novel (or at least The Great New York Novel) – but I’m not sure I’d want to read it even if it did exist. One of Rushdie’s key points is how the events around Trump’s election had led to an 'America torn in half, its defining myth of a city-on-a-hill exceptionalism lying trampled in the gutters of bigotry and racial and male supremacism', but that myth needed little trampling outside of the country.

And indeed this seems more to The Great A Very Small Part of New York Novel, the book dedicated to the people who introduced him to a particularly exclusive piece of New York real estate, the Macdougal-Sullivan Gardens Historic District (https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/29/fashion/new-york-secret-garden-anna-wintour-bob-dylan.html?_r=0) – I’m sure the detailed descriptions are highly fascinating to the 50 or so people that live there.

As for topics, where Rushdie has nothing to add, for no particularly apparent reason, the novel features, purely in the background and of little relevance to the real story, the appearance of a caricature of Donald Trump, a property tycoon cum liberal-baiting Presidential candidate:

'Gary “Green” Gwynplaine, a vulgarian whose name Nero could not bring himself to speak, and who liked to call himself the Joker on account of having been born with inexplicably lime-green hair. Purple-coated, white-skinned, red-lipped, Gwynplaine made himself the mirror image of the notorious cartoon villain and seemed to revel in the likeness.'

Albeit one does wonder whether this book was read as research in North Korea as at one point an ageing and increasingly mentally impotent character (albeit not the Joker) lets out as "impotent dotard's shriek"!

And Rushdie’s foray into identity politics ( “What is it? All this language stuff. The 73 pronouns, all of that. I’m a writer, I should know this” – see https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/sep/02/salman-rushdie-interview) is as ill-advised as Ian McEwan’s in Nutshell, another author who I suspect felt obliged by his status to enter the fray.

The shame is that all of this rather overshadows the underlying story of Nero Golden and his family, which presents the immigrant experience into New York:

'People who are born-and-raised New Yorkers are very proud of the fact. And rightly so. That’s the kind of New York novel that is not mine to write. But I know that most of us who live here were not born here. So much of the story of New York is the story of arrival, the story of people coming from elsewhere, and I thought that’s a story that I can tell. This was a very, very deliberate attempt to write a sort of immigrant novel of New York.'
https://bookpage.com/interviews/21741-salman-rushdie#.Wc48JmtSxpg

And the parts of the novel that tell Nero Golden’s back story, taking in the Mumbai underworld and the Nov 26 2008 and Mar 12 1993 terrorism attacks, was fascinating, with Rushdie demonstrating his tight control over his revelations ('Patience. I will not reveal all my secrets at once').

The story contains Rushdie’s trade-mark blend of fantasy and realism: the narrator notes early on that in Roman times (from which Nero Golden takes his assumed name), a golden story “was a figure of speech that denoted a tall tale, a wild conceit, something that was obviously untrue.”

Indeed it is almost a relief to see Rushdie’s signature touches, such as his delight in naming characters:

'There was a man called Don Corleone. No, of course that wasn't his name, but his name will mean nothing to you. Even the name he actually uses wasn't his name either. A name is nothing, it's a handle, as they say here, just a way of opening a door. 'Don Corleone' gives you an idea of the kind of man he was.'

Or per the authorial interview in The Hindu:

'I love naming. I think it’s something to do with coming from our part of the world, where we think about the meaning of names. We don’t just name children because it’s a name that’s in the family or because we like the sound of it. We give some form to what the name means and what its echoes are. So, I use that same technique for naming fictional characters. The two writers I admire for their naming are Charles Dickens and Saul Bellow. Uriah Heep! You already know who he is before he’s even opened his mouth. You know who he is!'

And his terrible puns. One incidental character 'bore more than a passing resemblance to the retired Wimbledon champion Pat Cash. This was the individual charged with the task of rescuing Petya from his fear of open spaces. Petya's hypnotherapist. His name was Murray Lett. 'If you call me, it's not a fault,' he liked to say, a tennis joke that only served (ouch) to increase his resemblance to the former Australian star.'

He even throws in stereotypical dialogue: the narrator’s Belgian parents speak with cod Belgian accents ("a world vissout mystery iss like a picture vis no shadows ... it shows you nossing") and have a shrine to Eddy Merckx, Magritte and Audrey Hepburn (an excuse for Rushdie to instruct us that she was born Edda van Heemstra), and our Australian tension coach speaks in strine (except Rushdie seems to have got confused with South African "Virry well, thanks. I had ivry confidence")

But by the novel’s end I felt rather like the narrator who, at one point, overwhelmed by the story declares:

'All I wanted to do was put my fingers in my ears and shout la la la la la.'

That said - whenever his next novel comes out - I will be first in the queue.

A mysterious billionaire, Nero Golden, and his three adult sons arrive in murky circumstances from India and move into a mansion in downtown New York. As they attempt to leave their past behind and reinvent themselves, their story is narrated by an outsider, a would-be film-maker called Rene, who thinks that he could use the family as a basis for a film, and bit by bit own life becomes inextricably linked with theirs. As the secrets from their past are gradually revealed their new existence slowly unravels. The novel is framed by the inauguration of Barack Obama and ends with the election victory of a candidate who models himself on the Joker from Batman. In this and so many other instances the real and the unreal play a part in this tall tale of identity, credibility, contemporary politics and the preoccupations of American life, against a background of assassinations, shootings, a suicide and a fire. Reading the novel is an immersive experience, with its tapestry of allusions and references, its discursive nature, its mix of the true and the fake, the real and the unreal, all narrated in Rushdie’s expansive and sometimes overblown style. I’m not a Rushdie fan but this one won me over and I thoroughly enjoyed it, giving myself up to the exuberance of the writing and the trials and tribulations of this compelling if unlikely family.

"- Fiction's élite. Nobody believes it. Post-factual is mass market, information-age, troll generated. It's what people want.
- I blame truthiness. I blame Stephen Colbert."

In "The Golden House", Salman Rushdie tells the story of the rise and fall of Nero Golden, a wealthy Indian businessman who moves to New York with his three sons - but this is only the top layer of this novel, the narrative center from which Rushdie extrapolates and plunges into different ideas, reflects events and debates, and pours out a myriad of references in order to add various levels of meaning to the text. Just as Edgar Allan Poe does in the The Fall of the House of Usher, which is also mentioned at one point in the book, Rushdie connects the physical and the mental unraveling of the Golden house, but then goes one step further and turns the family's destiny into a projection surface for current American politics, contemplating the state of the American Dream in the vein of The Great Gatsby (a work that is also mentioned in the text).

The books starts with Obama's inauguration, and one major topic Rushdie tackles is the question of identity, as in the identity of nations, but also of individual people. Upon leaving India, the members of the "Golden" family choose new names, so the head of the family arrives in New York as Nero Golden, where he continues to follow successful business pursuits and marries a beautiful Russian woman. His eldest son Petya is on the spectrum and struggles with his condition. Apu, the middle son, becomes a successful artist, but has a hard time trying to come to terms with the family's exile from India. Nero's youngest son, D, is unsure about his gender identity (Rushdie obviously uses this part of the text to outline his own take on gender theory: "The truth is that our identities are unclear to us and maybe it's better that they remain that way, that the self goes on being a jumble and a mess, contradictory and irreconcilable.")

Now in case you feel like there is still not enough going on (you must be nuts!), Rushdie also decided upon an unusual way to tell this story: His narrator René lives in the same block as the Goldens and is starting out as a filmmaker - as he is utterly fascinated with the family, he chooses them to be the subject of his first full-length film, filling in the missing parts of the story with his interpretations and guesses, but learning more and more about the family's story as time, his research and the book we are reading goes on. I liked this approach, as it mirrors how we all experience other people: Knowingly or unknowingly, we fill in the blank spaces with what seems likely according to our experience of the world, meaning that when we are trying to understand others, we are always reflecting the ideas we have about ourselves and the world - or as René puts it: "I was the subject, not any Golden man, and (...) the way the story works out would tell me more about myself than about anyone else."

So there are many interesting and even compelling streaks in this text, and I was not bored for one second while reading this book, but let`s face it: Rushdie packed way, way too much into this novel, and that's not even my main concern. My issue is that Rushdie wrote a pamphlet against Trumpism, nationalism, and the post-factual, and called it a novel. Don't get my wrong: I think we should all fight Trump's politics of hate, but a novel is not a newspaper opinion piece, and that's why I expect more from this art form than passages like this one about Trump (or as Rushdie calls him: "The Joker", because there are seemingly still not enough references in this book):

"(...) on one fact everyone, passionate supporters and bitter antagonists, was agreed: he was utterly and certifiably insane. (...) people backed him because he was insane, not in spite of it. What would have disqualified any other candidate made him his followers' hero."

It's not that Rushdie doesn't have a point here, but I already read this quite a few times and in a more elaborate way in newspapers. And there are more rather plain statements inserted into the text as Rushdie turns the story's characters into his mouthpieces:

"Across the Atlantic, in another theater of the identity wars, the British prime minister was narrowing the definition of Britishness to exclude multiplicity, internationalism, the world as the location of the self. Only little England would do to define the English. In that distant argument about the identity of the nation there were loud voices (...)" - you get the idea.

Yes, Mr. Rushdie, I am really angry and frustrated too, but this is not what I expect from a literary text, and - even worse! - it is absolutely unoriginal. When it comes to the message Rushdie wants to spread, I feel like I am better off watching the above-mentioned Stephen Colbert, Trevor Noah, or John Oliver, as they have found more original and artful ways to discuss and reflect current events. Art has to find new angles, twist and play with language, use irony or pastiches etc. - just stating the obvious is not enough (and in case you say "hey, there are millions of people voting for Trump/Brexit/LePen/AfD and who don't think all this is obvious" - I agree with you, but these people will certainly not pick up this book and change their minds). What might be the case though is that this book will become more interesting for readers in twenty or fifty years, as an artefact describing what it felt like living in 2017.

"If human nature were not a mystery, we'd have no need of poets." - I totally agree with this quote from "The Golden House", and this is why I want poets to write poetic texts, as these texts are trying to grasp the mystery of human nature, which is what newspaper opinion pieces cannot do. In parts of this book, Salman Rushdie rises to this challenge, but overall, it is a mixed bag.

I have always been a big fan of Rushdie, eagerly anticipating his next novel and never failing to be enthralled by his abilities as a writer. That was, however, until I began to read The Golden House. It is certainly not the fact that he has, by and large, moved away from the more fantastical 'magic-realism' style of much of his earlier work, but rather the fact that this narrative was simply too much of everything - too implausible a plot, too many digressions, way too many literary and filmic references, too much hyperbole (as the narrator confesses!), and simply far too long to hold my interest. By the closing pages, I no longer cared what happened to Nero and the remaining vestiges of the Golden household, and once I had reached the ending, the neat tying up of the remaining loose ends simply left me exasperated at having invested too much time in reading it!
The novel is set in New York and Mumbai and follows the exploits of the narrator René and his complicated relationships with the family of Nero Golden. It follows a relatively linear path, but one that contains numerous flashbacks and divergences to explain how and why everything ended as it finally did. It would be difficult to say that I warmed to any of the main characters nor that I felt much in the way of empathy or insight into why they behaved in the ways in which they did as we are rarely given direct insight into their innermost thoughts. Instead Rushdie used his narrator René to display his own undoubtedly vast knowledge of the movie and literary worlds to the point of tedium for this reader - how many more times do we need to have the plot of a 'favourite' film outlined in order to make a relatively simple point or to explain the motivations of one of the other characters? 'Knowledge is beauty' René tells us in a rant against anti-elitism in America, but in this case an excess of knowledge simply detracts from what might otherwise have been a fascinating novel.
If you enjoyed previous Rushdie novels, there are certainly elements of this one that will please, but ultimately you may well find yourself somewhat disappointed, despite the many glowing reviews that others have written. The Golden House contains all of the elements of what might have been a great book, but somehow it is just too overwhelmed by its own erudition to deliver.

This is my first novel by Salman Rushdie. Not a relaxing read but one which provokes thought. Simplistically, The Golden House is about the lives of a wealthy Indian immigrant and his 3 sons during the Obama era. Some of their wealth may have come from " less than ethical" sources but status and values are important to the father. The sons are all very different. (Issues of nature versus nurture come to mind.) The father remarries, this time a young Russian with different values and interests but obviously attracted to wealth.
Our young narrator lives nearby and becomes close to the family,; in someways too close. He sees life in the Golden House as providing a possible backdrop for an alternative film which he wishes to produce. Notwithstanding the demise of the father and the sons, he retains a lifetime interest in the widow and her son.
Rushdie weaves into the story comments and views about life in the US at this time. He introduces the Presidential Election campaign fearing that it might be won by The Joker! He raises questions about what does the history and experiences of the family reveal about vales and standards in the US today when coupled with attitudes to the Election (Candidates)? Clever and beautifully written the book provides the reader with plenty of food for thought. I felt that as an alternative the book could have been comfortably set in the UK today, Self contemplation in the UK maybe different to the US but with divisions generated by the Brexit vote and a seemingly powerless Joker as Prime Minister, there are parallels with national uncertainty and questions about our (changing) values etc.
If you want a strong read go for it and then give yourself time to think about it.
Recommended

A copy of this book was sent to me by NetGalley.com in exchange for an honest review.

I have never read anything by Salman Rushdie before and I have been missing out! This is a superb story of intrigue that sweeps you along with it. The story follows a family in New York who arrive in mysterious circumstances and we learn about their past and share their fate through the oberservations of a young film maker who lives close by. The head of household, Nero Golden, has instructed his three sons to never mention their past lives, where they have come from or how they came to be living in Obama's America. Each of the sons has more than their fair share of angst and problems to overcome, or at least learn to live with, and there is the question of where is Mrs Golden? Why is she missing from the family home?

The narrative is beautifully detailed and left me feeling like I too was standing in the room with Nero at the height of his confessions. My only tiny nitpicking criticism would be that I didn't quite get all of the more highbrow film and novel references - other more well read readers would have a greater appreciation of the nuances to the characters that these references offer.

All things considered it is a wonderful read and I thoroughly enjoyed it. I will be adding Salman Rushdie to my list of favourite writers!

I enjoyed this book, it starts at President Obama’s inauguration “when Isis was still an Egyptian mother-goddess”. The Golden family, having fled India, arrive in New York and move into the mansion in the gardens where the narrator René lives.
The father has renamed himself Nero, and the adult sons similarly take
Greek and Roman names: Petronius, Lucius Apuleius and Dionysus, but rapidly become Petya, Apu and D.

The story is framed as interactions with the family being mined for the film René is writing and developing over time. The narrator is a cinematographer who presents the story of the Golden family as a mockumentary, with many additions and filling in of gaps. Some of the story is recorded as a film script... “cut”.

The Goldens throw a party. Petya, the son with Asperger’s disease has a melt down and quasi-suicide attempt. The secrets start to come out. Apu becomes a society portrait painter, D meets Riya and begins to question his gender identity.
Nero Golden is acquired by a Russian Mistress who manipulates her way into marriage.

This is a greek tragedy with loud echoes of Oedipus, King Lear and the Great Gatsby, it was inevitable that the past would catch up with them...And as in Hamlet, everyone dies.

The families story comes out slowly chock full of allusions to Greek tragedy, ancient Roman history, identity politics, religious practices and films. The text sparkles with wit and intellect; a toga is “a bedsheet with big ideas.” The former pope is referred to as “Ex-Benedict,” a Russian Orthodox priest is “A beard in a tent.”

There is sharp political commentary- ending with a Trump- like character, described as ‘the Joker’ beating ‘Batwoman’ to the presidency.
“What was astonishing, what made this an election year like no other, was that people backed him because he was insane, not in spite of it.”
Then “lying was funny, and hatred was funny, and bigotry was funny,” and America turns into “a lurid graphic novel.”

I thoroughly enjoyed the story, and would recommend the book to others.

The first few chapters of this book are very strong, setting the scene and describing characters such that they become intensely realistic. Once we move onto the main character's ruminations on his work, the book loses momentum and eventually it lost my interest. This disappointed me as the beginning was so promising.

All that Glitters is Not Gold – Brilliant New Book by Rushdie

Powerful real-estate tycoon Nero Golden immigrates with his three adult children into a grand mansion in downtown Manhattan. They arrive after a catastrophe had occurred to them in the “old country” which is forbidden to name.

The narrator, and ultimately the unintended protagonist, is their Manhattanite neighbour and family confidant, René. He takes upon himself to tell the chronicles of the “Golden house”, and in a sense becomes the family historian, who is much involved in shaping their story.
The Goldens are everything you could dream of, and in a sense their appeal pulls René into their world: They are socialites, rich and influential. The house is packed with intrigue and mischief, of brotherly rivalry and everything takes a turn to the worst upon the introduction of Vasilisa, Nero’s second gold-digger wife.

Rushdie does well to tackle to significant subjects of our everyday lives through the narrative of the Goldens, and the introduction to their world, as examples:
(1) The constant struggle of East and West. The old country of the Goldens and modern Western Manhattan life are constantly on an axis of strife. Full with Eastern idioms and concepts, with a terrorist act that sets the motion of our tale, he subtly plays the strings of the Clash of Civilizations. It is very apparent with the allegory of the old tale of the appointment with death in Samarra, vis a vis Manhattan and Mumbai (deliberately referred to as Bombay throughout the novel, the old degrading Western mispronunciation).
(2) The folly of the latest American elections, along with criticism of the elected president, is constantly in the background. The Goldens arrival is shortly after the inauguration of Obama – a time when they are established at the apex of the NY society. As the family starts crumbling down, the narrator describes the madness of Gotham, who is falling to the flute of the coloured hair candidate represented by the green haired Joker. The more vulgar he gets the more they like him.
However, the Batman reference is not the only cinematic allegory. René being an aspiring filmmaker, and the son of two professors intellectuals, means that he incorporate many literary, pop culture, and cinematic references as he tells his story. This is a brilliant way of getting the reader to identify with the scenes, and painting a vivid image of them. We also encounter many allegories to popular folk tales such as Baba Yaga and Vasilisa, Vasilisa with the Golden Tress, and more as another way of spicing up the civilization bridge. While throughout the pages the author spares us nothing of his criticism of many aspect of the American life “Guns were alive in America, and death was their random gift.”

In a way, by actively getting involved with the Goldens, René is not just telling his tale but is in a voyage to self-discovery. “The trouble with trying to escape yourself is that you bring yourself along for the ride.” Tells him Apu, one of the brothers, before he embarks on his own catastrophic journey. It seems like René will discover this soon enough himself.

This is a brilliant novel, seems very different than anything Rushdie has ever written, but not shy of his usual opinionated self and social criticism (“Lies can cause tragedies, both on the personal and the national scale… Telling the truth can also cost you what you love” René recalls he had told Apu in one of their talks, this is apropos the 2016 elections). If one word of criticism is due to the novel itself, is that it’s too long, many of the monologues are overstretching, trying to convey a point which has already been taken. Nonetheless – shining 5 stars!

In typical Rusdhie-style this book is an eruption of ideas, characters and stories. Erudite and voluptuous in style, this modern fairy tale combines the story of a family with topical issues like identity, gender, celebrity culture and American politics.

As I have experienced with other Salman Rushdie Novels I found The Golden House a bit of a challenge to read. Not because I didn’t understand it but more because I felt I ought to keep reading rather than wanted to – I am sure there are other readers who will understand this!

This novel is written from the point of view of a film maker who is viewing his neighbours, The Goldens, past and present lives as both subject matter and inspiration for a movie script. The by-product of this is that there is a great deal of reference to films, directors, actors and the like throughout the book which would actually be of most interest to those who have studied the subject. Along with the cinematic theme there is also a strong political aspect to this novel. The author quite cleverly includes recent American political events exposing how ludicrous and to many of us how downright scary the state of affairs in the US has become.

This is a novel that makes you think, possibly even to the extent of questioning your own thoughts and beliefs, which is always a good thing, but unfortunately it does sometimes come across in places like you are attending a lecture where you are bombarded with a lot of information that you don’t necessarily need or that you haven’t signed up for!
I am glad I have read The Golden House but would I actually recommend it? I’m not sure.

This was such a startlingly accessible and excellent novel. It tells the story of the Golden family - patriarch Nero and his three sons - throughout the eight years of Obama's presidency as they make their way through the mega rich playground in New York City. As you would expect from Rushdie, the prose is exquisite and varied, being sometimes lyrical and almost poetry and at other times concise and practical. Our narrator is Rene and he has such a great voice. There is a wonderful black humour running throughout the narrative and the characters are fabulous in their eccentricity and effusive in the extreme. The book is peppered with literary references and in places, reverts into a film treatment, which sounds a little pretentious and off-putting, but actually works incredibly well. Overall this is a stunning book that tackles many difficult topics, such as gender reassignment, mental illness and ethics with a deft hand and a wise eye.
I received a free copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for a fair and honest review.

This is the first of Salman Rushdie's novels I have read, and I'm very glad I did.

The story starts a little slow, as the characters and setting are described. However, the more we get to know about the characters, the more intriguing they become. the families story of who they are and why they have ended up in America is slowly unraveled throughout the book, there are a vast number of issues dealt with.

This isn't a book you can skim through, or let your mind wander with, it's a complex book which draws you in.

This is probably Rushdie's best book since Midnight's children. The story is of an Nero Golden, an Indian mafia money launderer who flees to New York after the death of his wife in the Bombay terrorist attack. The talents of his three sons stretch credulity but it is immensely fun, funny and readable. The extent to which Golden is taken over by a beautiful Russian gold digger and the loss of the sons seems to be retributive of Golden's crimes, especially the last and worst, which is revealed in the conclusion.

I knew, because of the author, that this wasn't going to be a lightweight read and it wasn't. A family saga with more tragedy than laughter, the Golden Family found that inspite of their wealth life was full of obstacles to overcome. This book needs more than one read through to pick up all the references to ancient literary legends, classics texts and 21st century politics. But even though many baffled me a little, it was still an engaging, enjoyable read where language was used at its best and the reader drawn into the Golden life.
I did keep loosing the thread of the narrator laying out the plot of his film, so engrossed was I in the family's lives, but the narrator himslef was integral and became a familiar friend. An absorbing meaty read.

Came into this one with high expectations of my first Salman Rushdie book, and have to say I was a little disappointed. Didn't really connect with the characters for starters, which never bodes well for me. Also felt like it was overly verbose throughout, which niggled me at times. That being said though, it's a story on an impressive scale, and has flashes of great writing throughout, but more a case of these working as individual parts rather than contributing to a great book.