There will be plenty of people who like this book for whatever reason. I am not one of them. I found it a painful mess to read by an author whose sole intention, as far as I can see, is to impress everyone with how smart he is. From the boring long discussion of Greek mythology to his mention of every single current pop culture fad available, this appeared to be an author stroking his own ego. It was just painful for me to read.

Thank you Net Galley for a copy of this book. I am sorry I could not give it a better review but on the other hand, I wish for the part of my life I wasted reading this would be returned to me.'

I was truly astounded to discover that this was Rushdie. If you know Rushdie, then you are familiar with his often used style of magic realism - this however, reads more like realism with epic echoes of Greek tragedy. To be sure, we are still asked to stretch our imaginations quite far, as there is quite a lot of grandiosity and hyperbole and our characters repeatedly find themselves in far-fetched situations. But this is not to say that works against the book. If anything it pulls us in further.

Rushdie's vivid response to last year's election and the stunts that followed is visceral and raw, garish and vulgar. There were times when I could not pick my jaw up off of the floor. All of the characters are exceptionally colorful and the inspiration he draws from the seeming collapse of our modern civilization is one of the best responses I've seen yet.

He has remarkably contemporized his voice in a way that is almost unrecognizable but just as compelling when lined up next to his other work. I highly recommend this book. Thank you to NetGalley, Random House, and Salman Rushdie of course for the ARC for review.

I just couldn't get into this book. Typically, I love Rushdie's work, but I think it hits too close to home for me given the current political atmosphere.

It was a good book, but man, Rushdie likes to use big words. Sometimes unnecessarily so.

I kept wavering back and forth on this book. Sometimes I thought it was brilliant and other times I thought that it was tragically unsubtle. I also kept finding parts that I wanted to quote, because they were written so well and/or they described just how I felt. This was my first experience with this author, but I definitely want to read more by him now. The book covers so much territory including sons suffering from the sins of the father, identity fluidity and political commentary. It incorporates real events like terrorist attacks, a prison escape aided by a lovestruck prison employee and Trump's election (although using a different name for the clown-like, unqualified candidate).

The story is told through the eyes of a young, would-be film maker who thinks that the wealthy Golden family would make a great subject for a film. Nero Julius Golden comes from India to live in an old mansion in Greenwich Village with his three adult sons during the Obama administration. "[Nero] was majestic in all things, in his stiff-collared shirts, his cufflinks, his bespoke English shoes, his way of walking toward closed doors without slowing down, knowing they would open for him...and his often repeated dictum - one favored by absolute rulers from Caesar to Haile Selassie - that the only virtue worth caring about was loyalty." Each of the Goldens left his old identity behind and reinvented himself in America. Nero is later targeted by an expert Russian gold digger who has also reinvented herself and who comes prepared on their third date with a list of demands for cars, apartments and credit cards. The Goldens do very well in America until things begin to unravel for them (and for America).

As part of his political commentary, the author added how he feels as an artist and intellectual after the Trump election. "How does one live amongst one's fellow countrymen and countrywomen when you don't know which of them is numbered amongst the sixty million plus who brought the horror to power, when you can't tell who should be counted among the ninety million plus who shrugged and stayed home, or 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, and the creature of the Spiritus Mundi rises up and slouches toward Washington, DC to be born."

I was interested in the tragic arc of the lives of the Goldens and I totally identified with the author's despair about the direction of America. This was a fascinating, though messy, book.

I received a free copy of this book from the publisher.

If you read fiction for the plot, this book might not be your cup of tea. It is as if a very bright man emptied his head of every subject matter that came to light. Whether it be political commentary, art, sexual mores, etc.

It appears to be a book about identity that blurs the edges of what is fiction.

And the ending, for me, was a discordant note in the symphony he was attempting to orchestrate,

There are certain authors for whom every new offering can be considered an event of sorts. These are the writers who have achieved a degree of celebrity that transcends the literary realm and drawn them into a larger swath of the zeitgeist.

Salman Rushdie is one of those writers. He’s not possessed of top-tier writer fame – he doesn’t breathe the rarified air of the Stephen Kings of the world, for instance – but he is someone whose sphere of influence extends beyond the relatively insular world of literary fiction.

His newest book is “The Golden House,” billed as a return to realism for Rushdie, whose recent offerings have been rooted in magic and myth. Of course, there’s plenty of myth-making going on in this new work as well – it’s just the sorts of myths that are inherent to the American experience.

Rene is a young erstwhile filmmaker who lives in “The Gardens,” a sequestered community in Greenwich Village. His world is irrevocably altered on the day of Barack Obama’s inauguration, when a mysterious man calling himself Nero Golden moves into the Gardens along with his three adult sons.

Nero is an incredibly rich man, though no one is quite sure just how he came to have so much wealth. He’s a foreigner, though he is vague about his country of origin. His sons are all possessed of classical assumed names just as their father is, though they go by nicknames.

The eldest is Petya, an autistic agoraphobe whose brilliance is tempered by his struggles with brain chemistry and alcoholism. The middle son is Apu, a gifted artist who has managed to carve out a niche for himself in the New York at scene. And the youngest, who goes simply by D, is caught in an existential crisis and dealing with a lack of surety regarding his own identity.

Thrust into the midst of it all is Rene, who is understandably fascinated by these strange new people who have burst into his bubble. Initially, he seeks only to observe the Goldens in an effort to incorporate them into a screenplay. However, it isn’t long before he’s pulled into their orbit, establishing relationships with all three Golden sons while also attracting the gruff and glowering attention of the family’s emotionally distant patriarch and becoming enmeshed in the schemes of Nero’s newest wife. He spends the subsequent years becoming ever closer to the Goldens, a tangential family member of sorts.

When the secrets of the past that the Goldens sought to leave behind begin to once again creep out of the shadows across the ocean and rear up in New York City, some unsavory and savage truths are dragged into the light. And Rene, like it or not, is right in the middle of all of it.

Oh, and as the Golden world threatens to spin itself apart, a gross, coarse NYC developer calling himself the Joker thrusts himself into the presidential race and captures the country’s attention.

Like much of Rushdie’s work, “The Golden House” is dense with cultural references. By dispensing with the magical realism of recent years, he’s able to endow the narrative with a sense of currency that you can’t always elicit by way of the fantastic. Still, even at his most “grounded,” there’s something ethereal and esoteric about Rushdie’s prose; this book is no different.

Part of what makes Rushdie such a joy to read is his ability to navigate between the sublime and the ridiculous. Understated moments of subtlety sit shoulder to shoulder with overt, over the top absurdities … and it all fits together seamlessly. The mechanics of his narrative construction are meticulously maintained and finely tuned; the story moves easily even as the magnitude of the stakes ebbs and flows.

Rene is equal parts cipher and authorial stand-in; his questions reflect both those of the reader and of the writer. And the many Goldens offer opportunities for insight into various aspects of present-day American culture – the nature of big business and the One Percent; relationship dynamics and sexual politics; the fluidity of personal and psychological identity; the necessity and fragility of creativity; the impact and stigma of mental disorders.

Sure, there are a few times when things are perhaps a bit too on-the-nose and occasional references that come off as a little try-hard, but those are decidedly minor quibbles. At its core, “The Golden House” is the kind of immersive, engaging read in which Rushdie specializes.

There’s a reason that Salman Rushdie’s work is celebrated. While this latest offering has its imperfections, the truth is that there are few writers out there with anything resembling his combination of thoughtfulness and talent. “The Golden House” is a sprawling, roiling urban epic – a sharp-eyed observation and interpretation of what it means to be American in the 21st century.

Nope! 30% and I can't bear to read any more. Plotless (so far), stuffed so full of references to art, culture, religion and mythology there's no room left for humanity or empathy. Intellect without soul, and sadly largely without wit or charm either, unlike his last book. And oh, I'm weary, weary, weary of the liberal world of high literature's current obsession with gender identity. I think this is the third major new literary book in a row I've read (or abandoned) that focuses on transgenderism - The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, Days Without End, now this - 4 if you count Scott Turow as literary, which I've sometimes been known to do. Literature has become as trend-ridden and cliché-filled as pulp fiction. Does a memo go round each January telling them which subject is compulsory for the year? If so, I vote that next year it's something wider, like, let's say, life, the universe and everything - the way it used to be before one had to prove one's liberal credentials everytime one speaks or writes...

While the "American Dream" themes in this book are indeed reminiscent of our old friend Jay Gatsby, Salman Rushdie has crafted a novel that takes the current state of America under a microscope, dissects it unashamedly revealing our darkest weaknesses, and reassembles it into something entirely new.

The book centers around a family of a father and his 3 sons (one, an alcoholic with aspergers, one, a man who is struggling with gender identity and what it means to him/her, and the last, a gifted artist) who have moved from India to the United States (you'll find out the horrifying reason why toward the end of the novel) in search of a better life. When they arrive in the United States, President Obama has just been elected for his first term as president and all seems relatively well in the world (with a few exceptions) through his two terms as president. Nero even finds himself a young, hot, Russian gold-digger wife who insists that she is deeply in love with him and wants nothing but to worship at his feet (yes, friends, the irony and symbolic imagery is STRONG in this one). However, as the new election approaches, a villain he crowns as "The Joker" (clearly, Donald Trump) and his opponent "Bat Woman" (clearly, the better candidate... also known as Hillary Clinton) start wreaking havoc in the world and his life, along with the lives of his children. We see their lives unfold through the eyes of an overly curious neighbor, Renee, who dreams of turning the family's life story into a film. But is the film as glamorous and dream-worthy as he expects and wants it to be? Or does the new "American Dream" end in a more sinister downward spiral than us hopeless dreamers ever expected it to?

This book is so dense with imagery and so full of important topics (gender identity, feminism, gun violence, political responsibility, the overall battle of the forces of good & evil, the devastation of a nation upon finding out the results of the 2016 election and its affect on those who saw the U.S. as kind and wonderful having to rethink everything they know about the nation and about those who brought this horror into power) that it's hard for me to take just one piece of this book and say "THAT is my key takeaway." But, if I had to choose just one thing that I would say wraps up my thoughts on this book and its themes, it would be this quote from one of the penultimate chapters: "...We were the monsters we had always feared, and no matter what beauty enfolded us, no matter how lucky we were in money or family or talent or love, at the end of the road the fire was burning, and it would consume us all."

4.5/5 Stars and the only reason why it's not a full 5 is because I did find it hard to follow. I believe that that has a lot to do with the fact that this was my first Rushdie book and I was unfamiliar with his writing style.

"In our age of bitterly contested realities it is not easy to agree upon what is actually happening or has happened, on what is the case, let alone upon the moral or meaning of this or any other tale."

Honestly, this book is really, really difficult for me to rate and review. I personally did not like it, but I can see its appeal. The Golden House, among other things, is a commentary on the current political atmosphere as well as American life and culture in general, tackling issues from immigration to gender identity and beyond.

The story opens as the neighbor (and narrator, Rene) is observing the nature of the Goldens, noting that they are, in essence, not dissimilar to the many people that have come to America before: shedding their past identities, taking new names, renouncing their old customs and languages, and essentially starting anew. Rene spends the rest of the book observing and commenting on the oddities of this family in his quest to create a movie based on their lives.

The Golden House contained a plethora of interesting passages, and I found myself highlighting what I felt were deep, philosophical quotes on just about every page. This is a book that makes you really think, and it is quite apparent that the author, the great Sir Ahmed Salman Rushdie, is an intelligent, well-read, informed, and strongly opinionated man.

However, I ultimately struggled with this book, though I managed to stick with it and see it to the end. His dense, complex, and allegorical writing made for an interesting premise, but just not one that I was able to appreciate for what it was. Even though I only rate this as 2 stars, I hesitate to categorize this book as “bad” because it isn’t; it’s just not to my taste. I’m sure that people who enjoy a deep read with innumerable “highbrow” references that portray political satire will enjoy the nuance of this book.

Thank you to NetGalley and Random House Publishing Group (Random House) for an advanced copy of this eBook in exchange for an honest review.

I have praised this book to everyone who would listen to me, yet have found this a hard book to review. It’s complexity and beautiful style made my words sound trite in comparison. I was intrigued by Salman Rushdie because of his notoriety from The Satanic Verses; I am more intrigued after reading his latest book, The Golden House. What a mind this man has! He weaves through a myriad of topics, both ancient and contemporary, with an ease that draws in the reader in a captivating manner.
Nero Julius Golden and his three adult sons have moved to Greenwich Village from a country that cannot be named, from a city that cannot be named. The Goldens themselves cannot be named, as they assumed aliases upon arrival. Their mansion abuts a central garden, formed in the 1920’s by an architect who combined the rear yards of all the mansions to form a grassy quadrangle. Although he wants to remain anonymous, Nero and his family are observed by Rene, a young boy who also lives in the Garden. This young man, who has dreams of becoming a cinematographer, is the voyeuristic narrator of the tale.
Thus begins the epic tale of the Goldens. Nero, each of his adult sons, his second wife Vasilisa, and Rene all have complex stories. I love how Rushdie fleshed out the characters, much like a sculptor adds clay a dab at a time to a statue. Petronius is first introduced as the “big brilliant clumsy agoraphobic firstborn lummox.” He later expounds that he is brooding and damaged: dandyish, “conservatively attired but invariable smart”; we later learn that he is “tormented, an extraordinary, vulnerable, gifted, incompetent human being. He was physically clumsy, and sometimes, when agitated, clumsy too in the mouth.” Each character receives the same detailed descriptions, metered out in a precise manner to reinforce the earlier comments about them.
One reason that I read is to be entertained. The stories in this book certainly did that, often eliciting a hearty laugh, sometimes filling me with a certain sadness. I also read to be educated, which Rushdie did in spades. He discusses autism, gender identity, contemporary politics in America, folklore, hip art, cinematography and classic films. He weaves ancient history, contemporary issues and current events into a seamless tale. Two themes drive this story—Rene sums it up by saying that “the question is the question of evil.” Nero Golden’s business dealings in Bombay caused the family move, and lead to the eventual downfall of all the characters. The second theme is that the sins of the fathers will be visited upon the sons, which we see as the story progresses. And the climax of the book comes straight out of Rebecca—a fitting scene for the cinematographer Rene.
I love to be challenged by a book. I needed both a dictionary and Google as I read this book. I realized early that a serious reviewer would have taken more copious notes. I later knew that this book would require a re-read. By the end of the book, I had figured out that this book needs a study guide! English Literature professors could have a field day with this one. I’d love to be in one of those classes. And yes, I did reread it.
I received an advance readers copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

I’m a fan of detail in my fiction. I love it whether it’s literary (Donna Tartt) or historical (Alison Weir, Ken Follett), but when it isn’t specific to the story and is in fact an extrapolation of some minor concept, it can be exhausting. This means I left Salman Rushdie’s The Golden House feeling that the book was 800 pages long when it was actually only 380. Why? Because Rushdie has a brilliant mind so crammed with dazzling thoughts that they can sometimes take over the page. Which isn’t to say that those thoughts are unnecessary, because they’re not, but while current events provide the backdrop for the novel, they often take over center stage.

There is a story in The Golden House and it’s a doozy. In 2009 Nero Golden (not his original name) comes to America with a lot of money and three unusual sons. Petya, the oldest, is somewhere on the autism spectrum and agoraphobic. Apu thinks of himself as an artist and wants to live accordingly (but still on Daddy’s dime). Dionysus (D) is gender conflicted. Beyond those details everything about them is a mystery: their real names, where they come from, and where they got their money. They move into a mansion in an exclusive neighborhood in Manhattan and soon become an object of fascination for René, a young man with dreams of becoming a filmmaker who lives in the neighborhood. He decides the family, with all its secrets, would be the perfect subject for a documentary, but the closer he gets to them the more tangled his life becomes with theirs. By the time The Golden House ends nothing will be as it began.

Rushdie is masterful in his ability to pinpoint and then skewer all things controversial. That he does it with a trenchant wit is one of the reasons I have always loved his writing. This laser-like ability is still evident in The Golden House but, maybe because we are so far down a rabbit hole of the absurd in America right now, it consumes the novel, leaving the plot buried in tiny pieces amidst heaps of razor sharp, shiny prose about current events—namely a man known as the Joker who makes his way into the White House.

It’s all over-the-top, but one area where Rushdie never loses control is his command of language. Even when I’d lost the storyline, paragraphs like this one made me swoony with their eloquence.

How does one live amongst one’s fellow countrymen and countrywomen when you don’t know which of them is numbered amongst the sixty-million-plus who brought the horror to power, when you can’t tell who should be counted among the ninety-million-plus who shrugged and stayed home, or 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…

Spot-on as they may be, thoughts like these make it clear that, even with their money, flamboyant lifestyle, and secrets, Nero Golden and his sons can’t compete with what’s really on Rushdie’s mind.

I have always wanted to try a book written by Mr. Rushdie ad I’m not sorry I tried this book…tried being the operative word! Apparently, I just don’t have the brains to become engaged with this sort of complex novel. I didn’t care for the political views of Mr. Rushdie but realize that this gives me another view of the world.

This was a beautifully written book, with deeply complex characters that just didn’t capture my attention -I think I will be giving Mr. Rushdie a pass from now on. Apparently, I just can’t appreciate books like this – OR he just can’t write for the masses!

From the Marx Brothers to Trump, from Mumbai to New York, from gender identity to crime families, what doesn't this novel touch upon? Readers with deep command of classic, pop and historical references will do better with the rapid-fire delivery of the narrator's impressions. What is the book about? Fathers and sons. Who try to leave their old life behind. What outsiders see looking in, especially the book's narrator, a cinematographer developing a film about the family who is also caught up in their relationships, intrigues, and tragedies.

I don't think it's ever been a question whether or not Rushdie is a great writer. I think the question for me is if Rushdie is a writer for me.

While I could see and thoroughly appreciate the craft of the book, this book couldn't quite grab. This is not a book I longed to return to while reading, thus taking quite awhile to finish. There were many parts in the book I agreed whole heartedly with. Politically, it's quite obvious that we're similarly aligned. I'd think it'd be a little inaccessible for someone on the other side.

I do think the "mystery" of the book took a bit too long for the build up. It was exhausting that the narrator kept teasing the reader with what was to come.

The Golden House has a similar writing style to Rushie's other novels in that it is extravagant in descriptions and sometimes takes a few passes over a paragraph to make sure nothing is missed. The ties between current events and this book are obvious throughout, so a reader has to be ready to feel the emotional pulls that can arise with our current U.S. political culture.

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/rushdies-domus-aurea-the-golden-house-by-salman-rushdie/

A YOUTUBE SEARCH of Salman Rushdie seemingly returns fresh hits by the week, of some new lecture, interview, or panel discussion. It’s worth taking a moment to appreciate that this indispensable writer, who spent an earlier decade under a state-sanctioned death threat, is able to share his literary and cultural preoccupations as openly and frequently as he does. But ubiquity in public life can be risky for a novelist. In Rushdie’s latest, The Golden House, we encounter so many of those preoccupations that it often reads like the eponymous Goldens are less a family than an extension of a conversation we’ve been having with the author for years.
Nero Golden and his three sons flee to the United States after losing Nero’s wife to the November 2008 Bombay (or Mumbai) terrorist attacks by the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Tayyaba, which claimed hundreds of lives. They arrive in Manhattan on the day of Barack Obama’s inauguration. We learn early that Nero had more dubious reasons for leaving India, where he clearly kept shady company. Classic noir, where the forces threatening the protagonist’s existence at home ultimately reappear and continue to do so in his new life. In this case, the protagonist hides not in an obscure town but in the world’s capital. Where better to dissolve and reinvent oneself than in this melting pot (a theme Rushdie also visited in 2001’s Fury)? “They would,” the narrator René says,
escape from the historical into the personal, and in the New World the personal would be all they sought and all they expected, to be detached and individual and alone, each of them to make his own agreement with the everyday, outside history, outside time, in private.
But as every Rushdie reader knows, there is no such thing as the purely personal or private. Events intervene; the past is inescapable.
René is the Goldens’ young neighbor and a Zuckerman-like recorder of their stormy lives for a movie he’s writing titled “The Golden House.” The cast is big, typical for a Rushdie novel: Nero and his three sons, Petya, Apu, and D. (for Dionysus), the last being the offspring of Nero’s affair with another woman; these young men’s lovers; Nero’s new wife, a manipulative Russian named Vasilisa; Indian gangsters and several minor characters who shake the story from the margins. And then there’s the United States, whose promise to hiders and seekers, frauds and victims alike, is the opportunity of reinvention. Gatsby is evoked explicitly and implicitly throughout, but an important difference in Fitzgerald’s great book is that the American Dream itself is a corruption. In The Golden House, that ideal is only contaminated by circumstance. The United States is changing, banks and guns are deforming the everyday, and the far right is in heat again.
Alongside this is René’s own life, also marked by suffering — his parents’ death in a car crash — and betrayed love. He’s taken in by the Goldens and continues to live by their residential Gardens in the West Village even after later moving on. With girlfriend Suchitra, he makes documentaries and ads, but his primary task is to witness the Golden story, following each of the sons on his path from supposed freedom to disaster, which loosely springs from Nero’s original sin of capitulating to the criminal and corrupt back home. The death angel’s wings from Rushdie’s memoir Joseph Anton flutter here, too.
The perennial Rushdie themes are all present: historical decline, for these are “cowardly times,” much like the “fag-end of an age” in The Moor’s Last Sigh, or the “pygmies” taking over the stage in Shame; migration and metamorphosis; the question of how new ideas come into the world, which is one of the central questions of The Satanic Verses; and the inexorable grip of history. Character is not destiny (Midnight’s Children’s Saleem observed that most of what matters in a person’s life happens in his or her absence), the ground beneath one’s feet is always fragile, a “forthcoming doom” foreshadows everything.
Since Rushdie’s books hand so much down to later ones, comparisons are inevitable. This book represents a small shift in that it’s closer to the realist tradition than the books that made his name. So, whereas the Indian Saladin Chamcha grew horns as he crashed to British ground in The Satanic Verses, a novel about migration, D. embraces a new gender, donning his stepmother’s clothes, believing in the possibility of being whatever you want to be in the New World. The times are different, too, and what bears down on the characters’ fate is not the state oppression of earlier Rushdie but the violence of non-state actors.
The way this kind of violence circumscribes the Goldens’ destiny is too neat. Mother Golden happened to be in the Bombay hotel that the Lashkar-e-Tayyaba hit, but, as we learn, Nero would have fled India whether or not she was killed, as the Bombay underworld, including those who played a part in the siege, reentered his life. Her death seems simply a way to justify the novel’s interest in that event before its deeper schematic is revealed. One can sense Rushdie’s eagerness to make good use of India’s worst terrorist attack in recent memory, but an event like Bombay will quickly consume a story’s oxygen unless there’s something new to say.
A similar tragedy visits the Golden house in New York, with the same reaction chain of large public forces, private action, and personal loss. In this case, the United States’s wars have left a psychological mark on a peripheral and wholly unconvincing character, whose typically American act of violence catches another Golden who happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. The point is apparent: the times have produced an arbitrary, indiscriminate form of violence, whether by an organization or a lone nut that can catch any of us anywhere. But the book sheds little light on the America that produces that violence or how it shapes human action and interaction.
There are other big events — the housing crisis, Obama, Occupy Wall Street, the 2012 election, Bowie’s and Prince’s and Muhammad Ali’s deaths, La La Land and Manchester by the Sea, the rise of Trump and the shock of 2016 — but these aren’t integrated into the lives of characters the way that events in India, Pakistan, and Britain are in Rushdie’s three big novels of the 1980s. In an information-rich world, a novel that merely transcribes events will fast become obsolete, and no writer has appreciated this more than Rushdie. His portrayal of Indira Gandhi’s two-year Emergency rule (which concluded only four years before Midnight’s Children’s publication), like his admired friend Günter Grass’s portrayal of the rise of fascism and Nazism in Germany, was one of the most evocative of a major national episode and of the inconsequence of the individual — one of the reasons that novel deserves each of the three Bookers it’s won (the actual prize, in 1981, and the “Booker of Bookers” on both the prize’s 25th and 40th anniversaries, in 1993 and 2008, respectively). The nation was going to trample Saleem Sinai underfoot. In The Golden House, Rushdie wants us to see the numbers marching in the United States, too: “a plague of jokers, crazy slashmouthed clowns frightening the children.” But the events just sit and stagnate, and I suspect the Goldens could have been anywhere else and still faced the same personal crises. Even D.’s gender change feels static because the problem it provokes is confronted more in isolation, and largely through one of René’s summaries, than in how she makes her way in the world. The discrepancy between reality and what René chooses to reveal and obscure, for example ending many scenes with the stage direction Cut, is never very interesting.
Strictly speaking, sure, René and Suchitra are involved in current affairs, attending rallies and producing a popular ad campaign framing the Hillary-Trump race as a duel between Batwoman and the Joker. But the Joker/Trump isn’t nearly as scary or dramatic a presence as the Widow/Indira in Midnight’s Children or Mrs. Torture/Thatcher in The Satanic Verses. What we get instead are uninspired observations, like, “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.” Within the house, it’s Nero who augurs the right-wing tide, with lamely articulated contempt for the president and the so-called liberal agenda, the source of which is never clear.
¤
Rushdie is, as I wrote at the outset, as public an intellectual as one finds, possibly the world’s most famous writer. As such, we’re as familiar with his cultural critiques as his literary fixations (which of course overlap), and so there’s a sense of the familiar when we see commentary here on political correctness and related self and official censorship; rationalism versus religion; imagined community; and the politics of identity, not in the sense of a character’s internal search, but as “a rapidly growing multidisciplinary field,” as D.’s lover Riya says. A remark about the effect of Vincent van Gogh’s Starry Night is a rehash of a point Rushdie’s made in interviews. All fine in and of themselves, but since Rushdie doesn’t do any more with them as a novelist than he does as a talking head, they let in a draft of monotony.
There is even a disguised cameo by Rushdie’s late friend Christopher Hitchens, in Petya, who loves
everyone who offered him an opinion, and then to bludgeon that individual into submission by using his apparently inexhaustible storehouse of arcane, detailed knowledge. He would have argued with a king over his crown, or a sparrow over a crust of bread. He also drank far too much.
His targets, like Hitchens’s, include the British royal family, Islamic radicalism and the “wishy-washy liberalism” that appeases it, and the Pope; he knows the lyrics of Bob Dylan and finds Margaret Thatcher sexy — Hitch claimed both.
Petya is mildly autistic, the ostensible source of his pathological fluency, limitless knowledge, and video game programming skills. But it’s hard to find someone who isn’t inexhaustibly — and exhaustingly — learned in The Golden House, Rushdie’s erudition flooding page after page, character after character. The high culture references include Edmund Leach, Fritz Lang, Greek mythology, Spivak, Adorno, Calvino, and many, many more, and the dialogue, lacking the comic patterns of Rushdie’s more surreal tales, is both implausible and flat. Riya’s dialogue in particular reads like that of the guy standing in line behind Alvy Singer and Annie Hall talking about Marshall McLuhan, and one wishes, as Alvy would, that Spivak or some other such figure would step in and embarrass them into silence. Even the Russian Vasilisa speaks in fluent essays, with only the occasional grammatical lapse of a non-English speaker.
Rushdie, more than any of his contemporaries that I can think of, renovated our language in the 1980s. There are glimpses of that legacy here, but they’re overshadowed by the sounds of hard linguistic labor, as when Nero’s “face entered a condition of scarlet vehemence,” or when we’re told that at his wife’s funeral, Nero the emperor (after whom our protagonist is named) “burned ten years’ supply of Arabian incense […] in the case of Nero Golden all the incense in the world couldn’t finally cover up the bad smell.” One character’s “conversation was a series of random bombs falling out of the blue sky of his thought.” Death angels, René says, “keep pouring into what I invent like a ticketless crowd bursting through the gates at a big game.”
It seems, too, that Rushdie isn’t having the fun he used to have with language, much of which he used to save for his Urdu- and Hindi-speaking reader. We get René translating Indian words, explaining that “aadhaar” is a 12-digit social security number, and that “benami” bank accounts are those set up under fake names of proxies. This is a tradeoff, I suppose, of having a Western narrator, but how the Urdu/Hindi-speaker will miss the exclusive pleasure of Dr. Sharabi who treats alcoholics, and the Rann of Kutch Nahin, from Midnight’s Children (okay, let me translate: “sharabi” is the Urdu/Hindi word for “alcoholic” and “kutch nahin” means “nothing,” a play on the Rann of Kutch, a salt marsh on both sides of the Pakistan-India border). Now, for some reason, Rushdie has to explain that a card player’s “tells” are the “involuntary gestures that give away a hand.” When the word “dontyouthinkso” appears in Shame or “sotospeak” in The Satanic Verses, again we’re challenged into recognizing a South Asian way of speech; here, when an Indian character says “briberyandcorruption,” Rushdie has René clarify that “[h]e said it like one word, like electromagnetism.”
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To be sure, this novel has some compelling narrative threads, particularly René’s unromantic affair with Nero’s wife Vasilisa, which yields, as is her design, a child who will be heir to the unsuspecting Nero’s wealth. Rushdie likes playing with secrets around birth — the son who is not my son — and the spin on that motif in The Golden House returns some of the old Rushdie vigor, as when René feels “a tide of paternal rage rising in my breast,” or when, learning to please the new Mrs. Golden in bed, he wonders if Suchitra will, “during our less operatic bouts of sex, notice my body beginning to move in different ways, having learned new habits, dumbly asking for different satisfactions?” There’s poignant comedy to the young biological father holding “my son close,” his pleas with Vasilisa that he be allowed to have tea with his son, and his reaction to Vasilisa talking about compromising in her life with Nero because he is the father of her son: “This, to my face, looking me right in the eye! The daring of it was breathtaking.”
The denouement of this plot line is ultimately anticlimactic because it is crowded out by other plot lines, but it does offer a glimpse of what Rushdie can still achieve. As does Nero’s history with the Z-Company ­— a Bombay crime network based on the real life D-Company, whose boss Dawood Ibrahim is based in Pakistan — reflecting how wealth in a city like Bombay comes with risks as well as privileges. Unsurprisingly, Nero’s old friends have a final message for him. A smaller cast and a smaller canvas could have squeezed significantly more drama from these lives, but Rushdie doesn’t do small — even simple men and women evoke by their very names ancient emperors and heroes, their homes palaces. His intention is to make Nero Golden an allegory of the big human themes, of destruction and creation, of burning Rome to build the domus aurea. But by relying so heavily on accumulating events to reflect the times, Rushdie fails to translate the material into human tragedy.
As I completed the book, my New York Times feed was flashing a state of emergency in Virginia after a far-right demonstration in Charlottesville, flush with confederate flags and Nazi slogans, turned violent. With the news daily showing a changing American condition, how does the novel keep up, how does it do what journalism and the likes of Colbert and John Oliver can’t? By picking its moments, by connecting the world to literature’s perennial subject — the human figure. What can the novel say about Donald Trump? Probably not much at this stage. About the United States, the twenty-first century? Plenty. Does The Golden House do so? Unfortunately not.