The Golden House: Salman Rushdie

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The Satanic Verses (1988), novel of Indian-born British writer Salman Rushdie led Ruholla Khomeini, the ayatollah of Iran, to demand his execution and then forced him into hiding; his other works include Midnight's Children (1981), which won the Booker prize, and The Moor's Last Sigh (1995). All the references myth were telegraphed as loudly as a classic Russian novel, the basic themes as loud as Bollywood musical, the pathos and the tragedy as distinctly American as a Mafia film. Their neighbor, René, who loves the gardens, all things of beauty, is drawn to the Goldens; in them he sees a story that needs to be told. His passion is filmmaking; he sees himself as the artist painting their murky lives as he sees them, so that others will see them clearly, as well.

In such times as ours, the fabular and mythic may provide more opportunities than the contemporary everyday; and certainly novelists such as Colm Tóibín and Kamila Shamsie have recently turned to the ancient world to find touchstones for new work. Rushdie has always been an impish myth-manipulator, refusing to accept, as in this novel, that the lives of the emperors can’t be blended with film noir, popular culture and crime caper. On the evidence of The Golden House, he is quite right.

Success!

The Golden House is not Brideshead or Gatsby – it is too rich and too riotous. Rather it is a modern Bonfire of the Vanities, New York seen from the inside and the outside, as only a writer of multiple selves such as Rushdie – Indian, British, now a New Yorker – could do. It is a novel about the many bubbles of the United States, written by somebody who has never had the luxury of living in one. His is a hard-won wisdom. “To be plural, to be multiform, is a singular thing,” says Riya in her resignation letter from the Museum of Identity. The notion of identity as overlapping and many-layered is something with which large sections of white America are grappling, in a nationwide identity crisis: they thought they knew who they were, only to discover their sense of self has increasingly relied on telling others what they weren’t. Nero Golden, a mysterious tycoon with a sketchy past, voluntarily exiles his family from Bombay/Mumbai and moves to a voluminous mansion in affluent Manhattan. Nero has aged like a fine wine; he’s as perspicacious as he is formidable and speaks several languages.

The Goldens all told stories about themselves, stories in which essential information about origins was either omitted or falsified. I listened to them not as 'true' but as indications of character. The cryptoporticus of Nero that connected the palace with the nearby Domus Tiberiana was also part of the complex. It is 130 m long with mosaic floors and elaborate stucco ceiling decoration with vegetal elements and cupids. It lies beneath the Horti Farnesiani along one side of the Domus Tiberiana. [45]Then we meet his brother, one year younger in 'age'. Their birthdays are less than 12 months apart. Lucius Apuleius, a.k.a. Apu. is 41 -- a Gemini horsescope like his older brother Petya. Anovel grounded in historical fact yet rife with Rushdie’s signature imaginative prowess.” — Library Journal (starred review) Rene is writing from some point in the future, which is the reader’s contemporary time at the end of 2016. He warns us that he is an unreliable narrator: A ravishingly well-told, deeply knowledgeable, magnificently insightful, and righteously outraged epic which pos­es timeless questions about the human condition... As Rushdie’s blazing tale surges toward its crescendo, life, as it always has, rises stubbornly from the ashes, as does love. Booklist He leaned forward when standing or walking, as if struggling constantly against a strong wind only he could feel, bent a little from the waist, but not too much. This was a powerful man; no, more than that—a man deeply in love with the idea of himself as powerful.”

Unruly but exuberant… Much of the success of The Golden House, in fact, lies in its humour and in the vigour of its storytelling… There is a glowing energy to the prose that makes this Rushdie’s most enjoyable, mischievous and American of novels. Arifa Akbar, Financial TimesOnce upon a time a great man fled from his native country, a land embattled by infighting and death, and came to a country filled with dreams of a future of hope and promise. From the outset it reminded me somewhat of The Virgin Suicides, enshrouded in a specific time, that of vivid modernity, but equally universal in the ways of human behaviour, shadowed by that overwhelming feeling of impeding doom. In case anyone thinks i'm giving something away, please see the choice of Roman/Greek names for the main characters. Rushdie might as well have been shouting this is not going to end well. The family treads the same path of decline as the America it inhabits, from the hope of the Obama era to the what Rushdie envisions as the Joker presidency. It could have been called The Fall of the Golden House. Or perhaps that's sufficiently implied.