The Golden House

Starred review from July 31, 2017
In Rushdie’s ambitious and rewarding novel, a mysterious billionaire and his three adult sons change their names and move to New York City in an attempt to reinvent themselves after tragedy. Spanning the years from the Obama inauguration to the current political moment, the main story is narrated by René, an aspiring filmmaker who resides in the Gardens, the same fictional downtown Manhattan neighborhood as the pseudonymous “Golden” family of the book’s title. Each of the Golden sons is introduced in turn—the intellectual Petya, the artistically inclined Apu, their searching half-brother “D”—as René gradually comes to understand their origins and implicate himself in their dramas. After the patriarch, Nero, marries a much younger woman named Vasilia, her increasingly intimate relationship with René drags the Goldens’ history violently into the present. Replete with allusions to literature, film, mythology, and politics, the novel simultaneously channels the calamities of Greek drama and the information overload of the internet. The result is a distinctively rich epic of the immigrant experience in modern America, where no amount of money or self-abnegation can truly free a family from the sins of the past. Agent: Andrew Wylie, the Wylie Agency.

Starred review from July 1, 2017
Rushdie (Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights, 2015, etc.) returns with a topical, razor-sharp portrait of life among the very rich, who are, of course, very different from the rest of us.Where Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities sent up the go-go, me-me Reagan/Bush era, Rushdie's latest novel captures the existential uncertainties of the anxious Obama years. Indeed, its opening sentence evokes the image of the newly inaugurated president "as he walked hand in hand with his exceptional wife among the cheering crowds," even as our narrator, shellshocked like everyone else in that time of plunging markets and ballooning mortgages, worried that assassination was the inevitable outcome. Against this backdrop arrives a mysterious immigrant who has taken for himself what he imagines to be a suitably aspirational name: Nero Golden. So beguiling is Golden that, tucked away in a secret palace in a New York affordable only to the very wealthy, he proves an instant lure for our narrator, a filmmaker in search of a subject. Each member of the Golden household harbors secrets, sexual and financial and criminal, but the plot thickens considerably when a Russian arriviste, "Vasilisa the Fair," inserts herself into the Goldens' world, ticking down a checklist of all the pleasures she can provide for Nero given the proper options package: "You see the categories are ten, fifteen, twenty," she tells Golden of her monthly allowance needs. "I recommend generosity." It seems clear we are not meant to think of Obama but of his successor, whose election closes the book and who gives us Rushdie's decidedly unfunny, decidedly unironic condemnation of an "America torn in half, its defining myth of city-on-a-hill exceptionalism lying trampled in the gutters of bigotry and racial and male supremacism, Americans' masks ripped off to reveal the Joker faces beneath." A sort of Great Gatsby for our time: everyone is implicated, no one is innocent, and no one comes out unscathed, no matter how well padded with cash.

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Starred review from July 1, 2017
A canny observer whose imagination is fueled by anger, bemusement, and wonder over humankind's delusions and destructiveness, Rushdie writes novels that range from the mischievously fantastical, as in Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights (2015), to the sharply satiric and unnervingly realistic. His newest, a rampaging saga of power and blood, is centered on a Manhattan oasis, the Gardens, a shared stretch of verdant land behind a row of historic homes in Greenwich Village. On the day America's first African American president takes office, a mysterious construction and development billionaire and his three adult sons take up residence in a long-empty Gardens mansion. Their country of origin is aggressively concealed; their assumed names are startlingly hubristic. The patriarch, charming and menacing, is Nero Golden. His eldest is Petronius, called Petya, a man of sad, brilliant strangeness. Just a year younger, suave Lucius Apuleius, nicknamed Apu, is an artist. Dionysus, known as D, is a half-brother born 18 years later than Apu, his mother's identity known only to Nero. Gardens native Rene, an aspiring filmmaker, quickly discerns that the enigmatic Goldens are the perfect subject for a screenplay. He ingratiates himself with his new neighbors, gains entry to their fortress, and closely monitors their dramatic, tragic, and resounding struggles over the next eight years even as he is inexorably pulled into the molten heart of this doomed kingdom-in-exile. Rushdie's galvanizing epic of the fall of civilizations attacked from within is spiked with references to ancient Greece and Rome, the 2008 Mumbai terror attacks, and a litany of recent American mass and police shootings and other horrific crimes. It is also electric with literary echoes from Homer, Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, and Fitzgerald, and vivid with cinematic tributes to Bunuel, Bergman, and Hitchcock. This contextual amplitude is matched by narrative complexity as Rene experiments with different approaches to a story that is forever intensifying. He tinkers with form and facts, aiming for Operatic Realism as he recounts ruthless Nero's seduction by the coldly calculating Russian, Vasilisa; autistic Petya's hidden life as a brilliant video-game inventor; Apu's increasing fame and susceptibility to visions; the two brothers' disastrous rivalry over Ubah Tuur, a serenely elegant Somali sculptor; and D's paralyzing struggle over his (or her) gender identity, a theme Rushdie handles with delving sensitivity and forthright inquiryas does Arundhati Roy in another major novel of the season, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. Crimes of passion and greed escalate; the Goldens' past (which opens a portal onto India's systemic corruption, international criminal gangs, and terrorism) catches up to them; and the body count rises as Rene, in love with his gifted colleague, Suchitra Roy, harbors his own explosive secret. His entanglement with lies and subterfuge inspires a vehement critique of our descent into an age of bitterly contested realities in which facts and those who illuminate themscientists, historians, and journalistsare vociferously and perversely condemned as elitist and fake. As the 2016 presidential campaign roars to its, for many, shocking conclusion, Rene describes one candidate as the Joker and the other as Batwoman, declaring, America had left reality behind and entered the comic-book universe. There is a scorching immediacy and provocation to Rushdie's commanding tragedy of the self-destruction of a family of ill-gotten wealth and sinister power, of ambition and revenge, and the rise of a mad, vulgar, avaricious demigod hawking radical untruth and seeding chaos....

April 1, 2017

This latest from "Booker of Bookers" prize winner Rushdie chronicles a young American filmmaker's involvement with a real estate tycoon while plumbing American culture and politics since the inauguration of Barack Obama. It's all here: the Tea Party, identity politics, and, as the Guardian quotes, "the insurgence of a ruthlessly ambitious, narcissistic, media-savvy villain sporting makeup and coloured hair." One can almost hear Rushdie sharpening his knives.

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