The Golden House

This novel focuses on the Golden family, a very secretive, very wealthy family living in the most lavish mansion in an exclusive enclave in New York City. Initially little is known about the members of the family. They do not speak about where they came from, and their names are inventions; the patriarch calls himself Nero Golden and his three sons have names from Roman history and mythology. One of their neighbours is René, a young, aspiring film-maker. René decides the mysterious family would be a perfect subject for a film so he befriends them to learn their secrets; he ends up being more involved than he anticipated as he records their rise and fall.

Characterization is definitely a strong element. There are many characters but show more there is no difficulty differentiating them. Each emerges as a unique individual with his/her distinct personality traits, strengths and weaknesses, and interests. Petya, the eldest son, is the intelligent, agoraphobic, alcoholic with Asperger’s Syndrome; Apu, the middle son, is a gifted but attention-seeking artist; and D, the youngest, struggles with his identity. The siren Vasilisa who seduces the much older Nero is one of the most memorable characters; her ruthlessness and amorality match those of her powerful husband and make her one “among the all-time pantheon of designing women.”

René, the narrator, is not a likeable character. He inserts himself within the family and shamelessly uses their confidences for his own purposes. He is a self-centred voyeur waiting for disaster to befall people who treat him kindly. He also proves himself to be such a weak person. Fortunately, he shows some maturity at the end of the novel.

Though the novel is clearly set in the eight years of Obama’s presidency, I at first thought of Nero as a parallel to Donald Trump. He is deeply involved in the construction and development business so the word “GOLDEN, a golden word, colored gold, in brightly illuminated gold neon, and all in capital letters of gold, began to be seen.” This is certainly reminiscent of Trump Tower and Trump’s penchant for gold in his Trump Tower home and the Oval Office. Nero believes that “the only virtue worth caring about was loyalty” and that mirrors the president who dismisses those who are not first and foremost loyal to him. As Nero’s story of his corrupt rise to power emerges, there are obvious parallels with the rise of Trump. Nero’s marriage to a much younger Russian model is similar to Trump’s marriage to the much younger model born in the Socialist Republic of Slovenia. What about Vespa and Barron?

Then Rushdie mentions, “The Joker was on TV, announcing a run for president.” There is no doubt who the Joker is: “In Gotham we knew who the Joker was, and wanted nothing to do with him, or the daughter he lusted after, or the daughter he never mentioned, or the sons who murdered elephants and leopards for sport.” The presidential election “became a contest between the Batwoman and the Joker – Batwoman, who owned her dark side, but used it to fight for good, justice, and the American way.” The descriptions of the Joker are many and scathing so there is no ambiguity about Rushdie’s feelings about the current president. Sometimes, the book seems almost prophetic. As I write this review, the news is full of the investigations into Trump’s ties to Russian businesses and Trump’s unwillingness to denounce white supremacists, so reading references to “Russian oligarchs propping up the Joker’s shady enterprises” and descriptions of the Joker’s skin as “white as a Klansman’s hood” is chilling.

The book asks a number of questions and examines a number of issues. It asks whether it is possible for a person to totally reinvent him/herself? Is it possible to escape one’s past? Can a person be simultaneously good and bad? It discusses how difficult it is to find the truth. Several times it is repeated that truth lies beneath a veneer, that “the truth often lies below the surface,” and that “so much is hidden, now that we live in surfaces, in presentations and falsifications of ourselves, the seeker after truth must pick up his shovel, break the surface and look for the blood beneath.” Rushdie suggests that people lie more often than they tell the truth: “These are the times we live in, in which men hide their truths, perhaps even from themselves, and live in lies.” A character says, “’True is such a twentieth-century concept. The question is, can I get you to believe it, can I get it repeated enough times to make it as good as true.’” When René is not privy to an event, he imagines it and passes on his fiction as a truth, so sometimes it becomes difficult to remember what is reality and what is one of René’s fictions. He often uses the phrase “to tell the truth” to reassure the reader that he isn’t lying so the reader wonders whether at other times the narrator is lying. At one point he admits, “I’m also finishing up my Golden screenplay, my fiction about these men who made fictions of themselves, and the two are blurring into each other until I’m not sure anymore what’s real and what I made up.” Using René, a man whose career is based on the use of fiction, as an unreliable narrator is an ingenious way to emphasize the difficulty to getting to the truth.

Gender identity is also explored, primarily through the struggles of D. The reader, like D, may have to think of gender identity in a new way. Are you gay or straight and cis or trans? D is told, “MTF was male to female, FTM was vice versa. Now she was pouring words over him, gender fluid, bigender, agender, trans with an asterisk: trans*, the difference between woman and female, gender nonconforming, genderqueer, nonbinary, and, from Native American culture, two-spirit.’”

The style of the book would undoubtedly be called “elitist” by some. I agree with the narrator who says, “Americans tell you that knowing things is élitist and they hate élites, and all you have ever had is your mind and you were brought up to believe in the loveliness of knowledge, not the knowledge-is-power nonsense but knowledge is beauty, and then all of that, education, art, music, film, becomes a reason for being loathed.” This sounds like Rushdie’s defense of his intellectual writing style for the book is full of allusions to literature, both ancient and modern, and to cinema. René has an encyclopedic knowledge of films and film-makers and I don’t, so I know I missed a lot; I just didn’t have the time to research all of the references.

Besides feeling somewhat intimidated by the number of cinematic allusions, I sometimes became irritated by the number of rambling tangents. The paucity of dialogue and the lengthy sentences do not make his style accessible. Here’s one sentence that is rather overwhelming: “The person credited with making this profound change in Zamzama’s world view and range of interests was a demagogic preacher named Rahman, founder and secretary of a militant organization based in the city and calling itself the Azhar Academy, dedicated to promoting the thought of a nineteenth-century Indian firebrand, Imam Azhar of Bareilly, the town which gave its name to the Barelvi sect of which the preacher Rahman was the leading light.” Another element of the style that bothered me is the excessive foreshadowing of impending doom with statements like “by the time I’m done, much will be said, much of it horrifying” and “I could have prevented what followed if I had been more vigilant” and “Maybe I could have prevented what happened.”

This novel is very broad in scope. At one point René talks about the type of film he would like to make: “a mighty film, or a Dekalog-style sequence of films, dealing with migration, transformation, fear, danger, rationalism, romanticism, sexual change, the city, cowardice, and courage; nothing less than a panoramic portrait of my times.” All of these subjects are in the novel and there are more besides: gun violence, political corruption in the U.S. and India, mental illness, etc.

The book is well worth reading. It will not be a comfortable fit for everyone, but anyone who likes an erudite book that compels him/her to think and enjoys social, political and cultural commentary will love it. In addition, there is a plot with mystery and strong characterization. Though the book has some stylistic excesses, it has so much to recommend it.

Note: I received an eARC of this book from the publisher via NetGalley.

Please check out my reader's blog (https://schatjesshelves.blogspot.ca/) and follow me on Twitter (@DCYakabuski). show less

This one didn't have the same essence as all the other [[Rushdie]] books I've read so far, but it was still. Perhaps because it is more of an American story, and one for which Rushdie was partially inspired by a particular 'New York real-estate mogul,' the very words their own irony. The narrative covers the immigration and murky history of Nero Golden and his sons. Golden, obviously not his real name, is exceedingly wealthy though it's unclear from where his money flowed. His sons have uniquely diverse personalities, each peculiar in its own way. As the story plays out, told by one of the sons, Rene, an erstwhile filmmaker, more and more clues to Golden's past arrive in the form of tragedies. Ultimately, Golden's past catches up with show more him, again with dire consequences.

I love [[Rushdie]], but I think his stories set in the cultures and places of his youth are easily better.

4 bones!!!! show less

Rushdie's most recent novel seems to be a kind of moral fairy tale about how, in real life, the bad guys (Trump, in this case) always win, and how the only real weapons we have to protect ourselves against the ultimate triumph of evil are love and truth. But, in case we start wondering whether he's got religion in his old age, that's carefully buried under a ton of references to Suetonius, Great Cinema, Shakespeare, Bollywood, Edgar Allan Poe, Chekhov, Flaubert, Matthias Grünewald, and much else.

A father, Nero Golden, and three sons with equally Roman names, arrive to live in a grand house in Greenwich Village at the time of Obama's inauguration. Their neighbour, a young film-maker called René, is intrigued by the absence of any show more information about where they have come from and gradually starts to see them as the subject of an epic movie, with himself, naturally, cast as the narrator. But he can't help getting drawn into the tragic course of the action himself. Meanwhile, in another part of the city, the evil, cackling, green-haired, white-faced figure of the Joker, Nero's rival in the real-estate business... (you can see where this is going).

Rushdie isn't always totally convincing in capturing the voice of his millennial narrator, and he occasionally strains the joke of René's obsessive way of seeing everything in movie terms beyond the plausible elastic limit of 2000% or so, but of course it's still always Rushdie talking and we want to listen to him, so he just about gets away with the hyperbole. show less

I would like to thank NetGalley and the publisher for the opportunity to review this book pre-publication.

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, show more 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. show less

I don't know anyone else who has read all the way through a Rushdie book; they say they are too difficult. I don't get that, especially from people who can read classic Russian literature. Still, he does challenge on several levels. And this book shows the skill of a good writer - there are few who can write a book with nothing but self-centered, narcissistic characters and manage to keep you interested to the last page. In fact, most can't keep you interested past the first page. Rushdie can, and does again here, weaving contemporary events into a fictional narrative of people so lost in themselves they end up losing everyone else.

There's no one quite like Sir Salman. This was an absolute joy from start to finish. Contrary to what I had thought, The Golden House (or gilded cage) is not simply a satire on Trump, but a glorious Rushdiyan tragedy where every thought references some delicious piece of popular culture from points throughout history. In fact Trump appears only as a background distraction.

Rushdie is having enormous fun even while his characters are wrestling with weight and fate. In one memorable paragraph, Rushdie gets from classical Greek myth to The Tempest via a complete lyric from Lieber and Stoller's "Stand By Me". When an author is having this much fun, it doesn't always translate into fun for the reader. Not so here. The Golden House is show more everything I could have hoped for from a Salman Rushdie novel, which is to say everything anyone could ever hope for from a work of new fiction. show less

Rushdie’s “The Golden House” was a fascinating read. It tells a story of identity crisis and family, with plenty of twists and turns along the way. But most importantly, going forward, it sets the tone for post-truth narratives set in a time of insanity and turbulence.

The novel mixes new realism and postmodernist narration to set a new tone for itself, what the author calls ‘operatic realism’. Rushdie, defining it in an interview, noted that the style relates “my subject, the conflict of the Self, and the Other.” It is crystal clear how the world is set and developed, beginning with the optimistic Obama era followed by the sectarian, identarian crisis of the Trump era. Rushdie portrays an America that has forgotten its show more ideals and is ravaged by bigotry, racial supremacism, and ignorance. His characters, set against this backdrop, try to reconcile their truths and their views as an American.

It is also where the metafictional aspect of the narrative comes into play. The post-truth nature of the story makes it difficult to distinguish between truths and lies, fact and fiction. The unreliable narrator, Rene, confesses to not knowing things and outright makes events up, some with drama so amped up, it is hard to believe. The narrator also feigns surprise at twists and turns and adds commentary for added dramatic effect. It makes for great reading, but one can’t help but wonder how much of the story being told has ‘actually’ happened, if that makes any sense.

The narrator does it with an incredible duality of sincerity and detachment, too, resulting in a feeling of conscious naivety. The narrator inserts himself into the story at times yet remaining hidden in times of distress. The narrator often acts when it benefits him and is apathetic when it doesn’t. When things are clear to the reader, it’s not obvious to the narrator and vice versa. The same can be said for the way Rushdie deals with identity - it’s a mystery and an obsession in the story, ranging from the political to the personal.

It’s always a pleasure to read Rushdie’s prose. However, it often gets pedantic and pretentious, thanks to the constant film references and metaphors. Where one reference will do, Rushdie provides five. Where one metaphor is fine, he gives ten. I get the fact that the narrator is pretentious and a pedant, yet I can’t quite shrug off the feeling that Rushdie is also indulging.

The Golden House was a fun read. In the aftermath of the 2020 election, it’s that much more potent to see where America was and will be in the future. It was a pleasure to meet the Goldens in a time where insanity is the norm and deception is truth. show less