“If human nature were not a mystery, we’d have no need of poets.”

Without doubt, this is the best novel that Salman Rushdie has produced in a while. Rushdie uses the unsettled American political landscape – this novel begins with the inauguration of Barack Obama and ends with the rise of ‘the Joker,’ a (very) thinly veiled portrait of Trump – to great effect. He ties in the eight years of the 44th President to the ‘reign’ of Nero Golden, a seventy-something man, who arrives from an unknown location and moves into the ‘Golden House’ of the title; the place formerly known as the ‘Murray Mansion,’ before the occupants changed hands. The house, the grandest in the community, helps form a wealthy enclave in New York, with all of the rear yards of the properties crating an enclosed, communal garden, which is much loved by the residents.

One such resident is our narrator, Rene, who lives with his parents in one of the houses, and soon becomes obsessed with Nero Golden and his three sons; Petya, Apu and Dionysus (or simply ‘D’). Nero Golden has re-named his sons and carefully guards their family history and secrets. With speculation amongst his neighbours rife, gradually Rene befriends the residents of the Golden House, learns their secrets, watches their rise – and spectacular fall – and becomes involved in their lives, as they become linked with his.

Rene longs to be a film-maker and his subjects are to be the residents of the Golden House. Life, of course, is not static, and the arrival of women in the Golden men’s lives, changes the dynamics within the Golden House in many ways. Indeed, the family secrets, the intrigue, the relationships between the characters would undoubtedly make a block buster of a movie. Rushdie effortlessly weaves his characters, who take their names from myth and the ancient world, and combines this with the current political landscape, to create a riveting account of a young man’s awakening and his confusing relationships with those around him. An excellent novel, which would be perfect for reading groups, with so much to discuss. I received a copy of this book from the publisher, via NetGalley, for review.

While I have greatly enjoyed most of Salman Rushdie's previous books, I did not like this one and did not finish it. Yes, Mr Rushdie is a cultured and clever writer, and I have appreciated his other works, but this one was just a bit too 'knowing' (or smug to be less polite), throwing around so many references that I found it tiring and annoying after a while. I did try again to continue, but gave up about halfway.

Review of an advance digital copy from the publisher.

Whenever a new novel is published by Salman Rushdie I am on tenterhooks waiting to begin it as I know I will be in for a literary and thought provoking treat. However this desire to get started is tempered with the knowledge that once I start it will be finished all too quickly and I may have to wait a while for the next Rushdie. 'The Golden House' was no exception to this rule and from the start I was immersed in what I was reading, leaping with joy at all the intertextual references, in this case to Roman and Greek mythology; 'classic', contemporary and Bollywood films; and lyrics of iconic popular songs.
'The Golden House' is set in contemporary New York and narrated by René, the wannabe filmmaker son of well-to-do liberal parents who live in a privileged area of the city and are neighbours of Nero Golden. René is keen to make a film about the Golden household and the narrative follows his efforts to find out more about the mysterious family who arrived just as Obama was inaugurated. The story continues for the following eight years until the election of a new 'Joker' president. On the one hand there is a story of a family mired in mystery, deceit and hidden truths. On the other hand this story is told against the backdrop of changes in US and international politics. René, being an aspiring filmmaker, often tells his tale in film script style as he imagines the way he might depict events in the Golden House.
Characters, major and minor, are beautifully crafted and the reader gets to know their hidden motivations and angsts well. There are many strong (though not always likeable) female characters in the story, who play vital parts in the narrative's development.
I loved this novel and highly recommend it.

The Golden House is a relevant and highly referential novel that charts the recent years of American culture and politics through the story of an immigrant real estate tycoon. Nero Golden moves to New York from Mumbai with his three grown up sons, where they are watched and befriended by their neighbour René, an aspiring filmmaker. René narrates the novel and charts the fall of the house of Golden, set against the years of the Obama presidency and the recent US election.

Rushdie writes in a captivating style from the outset, with a mysterious narrator who has a degree of self-consciousness about his own growing involvement in the story he is telling. The conceit of René being a filmmaker who slips into writing in a film script structure at times and who deviates from the narrative by discussing and comparing events to classic cinema works well to give the novel a sense of truth and fiction, an invented narrative suffused with real life events and popular culture references. Literary references are used more sparingly, but the narrator slips in Eliot’s Prufrock and various other quotation at times. The combination of these references with key elements of recent culture from gamergate to prejudice surrounding gender identity creates a novel that is very much situated in the modern world, whilst self-consciously telling a story.

The narratorial coyness surrounding real political events—a certain president’s rise, for example, is depicting though not in so many words—has a faintly smug feel, but this serves as part of the enjoyment too. The style is distinctive and will be a hit with anyone who likes highly referential prose with a degree of self-awareness. The narrative is gripping, with the story moving between Nero, his three sons, and the narrator René, and with a tendency to foreshadow that isn’t too obtrusive. Near the end there is a fair amount of exposition that can get a little slow, but otherwise the pacing is good and the story an interesting mix of drama, gangsters, identity, and lies.

In The Golden House, Rushdie has clearly written a novel for the Trump era, for the internet age of trolls, and for the mix of the old and the new. There is something about the book, particularly in its style and narration, that draws the reader in, even whilst it celebrates its own clever references. It is about reinvention and transformation, and about media for telling stories. Rushdie has captured at least some element of the modern day and it is worth reading.

Book supplied by Netgalley for an honest review.

Salman Rushdie's The Golden House was one of those treats where I started the book without knowing a thing about it. Immediately you know you're in the safe hands of a storyteller, not just a plotter or a writer, but a craftsman who knows his story-telling trade. The story twists at the start while the characters settle down and the narrator (a neighbour to the Golden's) is established, and then it jumps into a full blown inspection of identity. His suite of characters tackle all the main issues - loyalty (whether to the family or your nation), gender politics, political leaning, mental health, and so on, all addressed like a debate where different views are expressed (my favourite was the trans-billionaire opponent).

I'd be interested to know the genealogy of this parable since I suspect there's a story in there too, maybe a frustration with recent elections. For example, towards the end of the book, Rushdie vents - "when your fellow Americans tell you that knowing things is elitist and they hate elites, and all you have ever had is your mind and you were brought up to believe in the loveliness of knowledge, not that knowledge-is-power nonsense but knowledge is beauty, and then all of that, education, art, music, film, becomes a reason for being loathed."

I tend to review books as it helps the author - they get feedback, gain social media exposure, and hopefully as a result, gather more sales. I think Salmon Rushdie may have enough presence already that my little voice isn't going to make a difference! Still, this review is my way of saying thanks, for an intelligent, remarkable book, that is going to set the benchmark for all future books that I read.

This was my first Salman Rushdie novel and I was absolutely wowed! I expected it to be a challenge to read but it's not - you just need to pay attention while reading as every sentence seems to be of importance. It's beautifully written so you won't want to let your mind wander anyway. I loved Salman Rushdie's style of writing. While reflecting the current political and cultural landscape and atmosphere of the US, its language is much richer than your usual contemporary fiction novel. Rushdie gives us his take on family, infidelity, identity, autism, politics and more and you'll soon be drawn into the Golden family and their story.

It's the day of Barack Obama's inauguration when Nero Golden and his three adult sons take up residence in New York’s Greenwich Village. The sons are Petya, 44, an agoraphobic and alcoholic, Apu, 41, a flamboyant artist, and D the youngest at 22 who has a deeply held secret. But there are many more secrets in this family. The biggest of all- why did they come to the US and changed their identities.

The narrator René - the Golden’s neighbour - is a young and ambitious filmmaker. René is intrigued with the Goldens and finds his way into the family to find out what brought them here and what their background is so that he can make a movie about them.

The novel starts with introducing the different characters and further into the novel, events with catastrophic consequences for the family begin to unfold. All characters are beautifully developed and really come to life and leap off the page. Soon, you won't want to put the book down and you won't be disappointed!

This is not an easy book to read. There is a story buried in amongst a mass of words and it rarely becomes something the reader can relate to. The scope of coverage of contemporary events is interesting but not really contributing to the understanding of the story.

Narrated by René, an aspiring filmmaker, this is an account of the arrival in New York in secretive circumstances of a super-rich family from India and the subsequent, often cataclysmic events surrounding them, in which René plays a part. The slow emergence of a dark history of corruption and evil is paralleled by Rushdie's perception of the rise of ignorance, untruth, bigotry and hatred, and of "The Joker" (i.e. Trump, although he is never named). I found it a slow but gripping story which Rushdie also uses as a vehicle for portrayal and discussion of the times from 2008 to 2016 – the Obama presidency – including penetrating analyses of…

The writing is brilliant. It is discursive, sometimes addresses the reader directly, even sometimes adopts the form of a screenplay and has a wonderful voice of its own. It is full of cultural allusion of all kinds, especially to film, so that even a neat, passing phrase like "in the age of the search engine, all knowledge is just a motion away," made me suspect that the echo of Paul Simon was deliberate. References to literature abound - including, I was rather shocked to note, a misquotation of Kipling :o). - and a friend who is a classical scholar assures me that it is also crammed with references to Greek and Roman literature and myth, only a small portion of which I noticed, I suspect. No doubt there is more which I failed to spot entirely.

This could be dreadful: apparently self-referential writing full of cultural references almost shouts of an arrogant, conceited author showing off for all he's worth, something I can't stand in writers like Tom McCarthy, for example. But it isn’t like that at all; it's readable, engaging and enjoyably insightful and intelligent. Most of the time it really works and I loved it.

It's not flawless. I found the denouement a little slick, for example, (in spite of the "if this were a movie" disclaimers) and the postmodern blurring between supposedly objective narrative and things René has "made up" for his screenplay did get a bit much occasionally, especially in a book which excoriates the Trump-inspired replacement of truth with untruth. It could be argued that this is simply mirroring and illustrating what Rushdie is criticizing, but it felt to me a little too much like trying to have his cake and eating it.

Nonetheless, I thought The Golden House was excellent. I confess that I've not read a Rushdie novel since giving up on Midnight's Children 35 years ago, so I was slightly dreading this, but I was very impressed by its intelligence, its insight, its superb writing and – slightly surprisingly - its readability. In short, I think this is an important, insightful book which is also a very good read. Warmly recommended.

It's been a while since I've enjoyed a Rushdie novel as much as this one. If you're looking, though, for a linear, coherent piece of storytelling (does anyone come to Rushdie for that?) then this might be unsatisfying. Instead it's a brilliant, exuberant piece of writing, all fireworks and brazen juggling of allusions: historical, filmic, literary. From the appropriations of Roman history and culture (Nero, Apuleius, Petronius, Ovid) to the final splitting apart of Yeats' 'The Second Coming' , this reclaims art from the ravages of the financial elite currently dissing intellectual culture as 'elitist'.

The fall of the house of Golden takes place in the space between the first election of Obama and the recent election of Trump, figured here as the Joker, and ends with a fire that is also a warning.

I don't want to say anything about the plot so far in advance of publication (thanks Random House and NetGalley) but will suggest that this is Rushdie showing all his sides to advantage: playful, intellectual, sharp, despairing, tentatively hopeful. Definitely a must-read of summer 2017.