I love the way Salman Rushdie writes. It is sometimes funny, sometimes dark. Also, I loved the way he wrote about my favourite city Mumbai. A great read.

As always, great writing from Salman Rushdie. A stellar contemporary mystery. Thanks for the opportunity to read this and review it.

Nero Golden is a powerful real estate tycoon who relocates to New York under mysterious circumstances, shortly after Obama’s inauguration. He arrives with his three adult sons, who all have issues of their own. The four Golden men take new identities with classical Roman names – Petronius, Lucius Apuleius, Dionysius – and enter into the high society of the rich and famous in downtown Manhattan.

Narrated by the Golden’s neighbor and family friend Rene, an aspiring filmmaker, Nero and his sons seem like the perfect subject for documentation. Rene chronicles their rise to power in New York society, their tragic ups and downs, and their eventual fall from power. The Goldens face conflicts involving money, women and the betrayal that takes place between siblings – all of it leading to an impending sense of danger.

The novel covers all the relevant plot points of American politics in the past eight years, starting with the new era of the American dream following Obama’s inauguration and ending with the ascendancy of an ambitious, media-savvy villain who aspires to become the 45th president – which should sound familiar to most of us. In our current political climate of “alternative truths”, The Golden House is a timely novel of identity, truth and lies – both personal and political.

This novel is classic Rushdie in both plot and style – it takes heavy themes and carries them lightly. It is a serious, literary, political novel while remaining highly readable. The references to The Great Gatsby emphasize the glittering New York setting – it is tragic, gaudy and clever. In fact, my main complaint is that it is sometimes overly clever, as only Rushdie can be.

The world of the Goldens is a post-modern, post-truth America with a focus on identity – hidden or otherwise. The unreliable narrator emphasizes this fact, and the fact that the many narrators of our current political situation are unreliable as well. Rushdie’s own opinions about the cartoony villain leading the country are clear, and leave no doubt about who he is referencing. This is a lengthy novel packed with pop culture and political information, and yet it is a fast paced and enjoyable read, and a clever guide to America today.

I received this book from Random House and NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

The narrative voice here really let this book down-it was overly elegiac and felt overwritten in a way that ended up unbearable to me. Sometimes, there'd be some insight that made this worth slogging through but in the end, I skipped around and didn't really finish the book. The characters lacked flesh in a way and the setting was overwrought.

"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 stories a man told about himself revealed him in ways that the record could not."

The Golden House, by Salman Rushdie, is about Nero Golden and his three grown sons, living the life in New York City. It begins the day Barack Obama is inaugurated as president and ends some eight years later.

It is not the book I thought it would be.

While it mocks The Joker who eventually won the country, it takes a few jabs at Obama along the way. Nero Golden, meanwhile, is himself a kind of golden-boy caricature, one young wife after another, his spoiled progeny, so much gold it's garish.

"I assumed he had brought serious funds with him when he came west, but there were persistent rumors that all his enterprises were highly leveraged, that the whole mega-business of his name was a flimflam game and bankruptcy was the shadow that went with his name whenever he took it for a stroll. I thought of him as a citizen not of New York but of the invisible city of Octavia which Marco Polo described to Kublai Khan in Calvino's book, a spider-web city hanging in a great net over an abyss between two mountains. "The life of Octavia's inhabitants is less uncertain than in other cities," Calvino wrote. "They now the net will last only so long." I thought of him too as one of those characters in animated cartoons, Wile E. Coyote perhaps, who are constantly running off the edges of canyons, but who keep going, defying gravity, until they look down, and then they fall. The knowledge of the impossibility of the attempt brings about its calamitous ending. Nero Golden kept going, perhaps, because he never looked down."

I had thought Golden was meant to serve as a commentary on, or parody of, Trump. It feels like the whole novel is supposed to be doing that, yet failing to do that. It's not really about the Obama years, or about the America that allowed Trump to happen. But I can't shake the feeling that it should be.

This novel (much like our times?) is chaotic. It's told by a storyteller (I mean Rushdie, not his weak narrator), but there's not much story to it. While it's easy to get swept up in Rushdie's prose, it wears thin after a couple hundred ADHD pages.

There are some compelling narrative threads but they don't come together satisfactorily. Big themes include identity and re-invention of self.

About two-thirds of the way through,
"Then a friend of mine, a writer, a good writer, said something that scared the pants off me. He said, think of life as a novel, let's say a novel of four hundred pages, and the imagine how many pages in the book your story has already covered. And remember that after a certain point, it's not a good idea to introduce a new major character. After a certain point you are stuck with the characters you have. So maybe you need to think of a way of introducing that new character before it's too late, because everyone gets older, even you."

I thought, maybe this is it, maybe this is where it gets interesting, someone new to shine a light, but no. There was no one. I had stopped caring.

The Golden House novel left me feeling bored and disappointed.

I have much reverence for most of the work of Salman Rushdie. He has written many great, if not important novels. This however is not his finest hour. If someone who had never read Rushdie or had read one of two other novels by him, and asked if this was one worth reading, I would say to skip it until the end of the journey through his novels. Rushdie always spins a decent yarn, but this one is probably my least favorite of them all.

Two reasons why I would not recommend this to anyone but the die hard Rushdie reader and not the casual fan. 1. Rushdie writes this is a folksy, come sit on Uncle Salman's lap and hear the story of the Golden family and the interloper Rene Unterlinden. Rene is the narrator of the novel, and he is not the best narrator. He uses movie plots and legends to explain scenes and reactions in a way that takes away from the tension that is happening, as if the balloon has been deflated sometimes. Even though some of the characters are interesting, including the oldest Golden son and the youngest Golden son, it does not feel like Rushdie gives them the fair shake that they deserved. 2. The politics. If you are someone who has watched late night TV talk shows, you have seen Rushdie and his dislike for the current president. When "The Golden House" was being hyped, many were talking about how Rushdie was writing a novel about Trump. This not exactly the case. There are sections that do not really bring anything to the story, little essays about the race between Trump the Joker and Hillary, whom he calls BatGirl. It is easy to see what side of the argument he is on, but he does it in such a vague, meandering way, and the fact that the story stops completely for these parts, it is just pointless and kills the flow of the story.

Nobody is going to tell Rushdie what he should and should not write. He is going to write the things he wants, and he has been successful enough that it does not matter. What matters is that the time spent reading this should only be spent by those who have read his major works, "Midnight's Children" and "The Satanic Verses," at least. This one feels a little called in.

I enjoyed this more than any of Rushdie's books since Midnight's Children. I did find it dense, but that's just his writing style. This book seemed much more accessible than some of his because the plot didn't contain a lot of magical elements. Just enough exotic elements, and a complicated plot that kept me engaged.

Using a combination of the genres of memoir, magical realism, crime fiction, and screenplays allows Rushdie to weave a complex, original and contemporary novel that entertains and enlightens the reader as they delve into the world of the Goldens and narrator Rene. It is a magisterial achievement by one of contemporary fiction's greatest writers as he has captured the angst and craziness of the Trump period.

I took a while to get in to Rushdie's latest novel, and rad many other novels in between getting through it! Of course he is a master with language, but perhaps it was too American for me to become totally engrossed with the political shenanigans. I have yet to read a Rushdie book that comes near 'Midnight's Children'.

3 or 3.5 stars. The only Rushdie works I had read were "The Satanic Verses" and "Midnight's Children" and I loved them, so I had high hopes for this one. However, I didn't like it nearly as well as those two. The narrator of this novel wants to make a film about some neighbors of his and spends most of the book telling us how he's planning to go about that. Well, that element of remoteness made it hard for me to connect to him or those neighbors of his. The book is also pretty dense with allegories and allusions and plenty of social commentary about both the U.S. and India. Very interesting, but not necessarily easy to read. Three quarters or so into the book, our narrator finally starts interacting more with the other characters rather then just telling us about them and their lives and I found the book much more enjoyable from that point. Anyway, there was so much in this book that I was left with the feeling that Salman Rushdie is a genius, but that this isn't my favorite of his works.

Thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for providing me a free eARC of this book.

Once 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.

Ah, yes, an apt description of Salman Rushdie and his primary character in The Golden House, Nero Golden. As I read through this verbose tale of the egotistical Golden, I realized that this was, in fact, a veiled auto-biography of Rushdie, intended or otherwise, most likely not.

In The Golden House, Nero Golden has immigrated to the US under secret circumstances with his adult children all of whom have assumed Roman names: Petronius, or Petya; Lucius Apuleius, or Apu, and Dionysius, or D. The family lives in downtown Manhattan in a gated community. The story is narrated by Rene', a neighbor and aspiring film maker who wants to make documentary about this mysterious family. It takes nearly 200 pages for the reader to gather this information.

Additionally, midway through the book the characters become involved in the contentious election of 2016, about which Rushdie makes his opinions very clear - the winner being The Joker. Seriously. He has green hair.

I truly understand metaphorical writing. I appreciate humor and certainly enjoy social commentary. However, I never fully understood into which of these The Golden House fell. There was so much verbage, so many ideas, too many great quotes, but they never were tied together cohesively. If Midnight Children was Rushdie in his brilliance; this was Rushdie in full shade, with the curtains drawn and all of his hidden thoughts allowed to run amuck. Reading it was like watching a three ring circus without knowing where to look. Do you follow Nero and his sons? Rene' and his ramblings? The Joker and the election? Look here, look at me, but you couldn't follow all three because they only were held together by a gossamer filament.

Rushdie attempts, always, to enlighten his readers with social themes, political nuance, global issues. With The Golden House, however, his own personal discord and past have left us with a muddled mess. If you have not read this author before, please do so but begin with his earlier works.

Thank you to Netgalley and Random House for my copy of this book

This book is extremely hard for me to review or even to synopsize. It took me forever to finish as I felt it started slowly, but the middle was very interesting, and then the end had this odd chapter of just info dump which I'm not sure was necessary. Overall, the characters were interesting but not likeable, the foreshadowing became repetitive and annoying, and it read like a Greek tragedy. However, much of the writing was fascinating and unique, the political commentary was brilliant (mostly the parts about the most recent American election), and the social commentary and exploration of current social themes was educational and thought-provoking. So, a mixed bag. My first Rushdie (amazingly enough) and I am sure I'll go and read some more.

Slow and too much going on. Have never read Rushdie before and don't really feel the need to read any others based on this book.

Nobody writes like Salman Rushdie, and he has again published a quirky, timely, funny, and unforgettable novel. It was particularly satisfying to read THE GOLDEN HOUSE in the days of Mad King Trump. GOLDEN HOUSE is a stunning example of spinning straw into gold(ens). Rushdie's work is truly international and genuinely political without grandstanding. But above all, this novel is enjoyable. A must read by one of our most important writers.

Could not get into this book at all. I have been curious to read work by the author, but I'll have to try something else.

I tried for months to finish this book. It was well written (of course) but I just couldn't get into it even though the characters were well done. I got half way through. I did really enjoy Midnight's Children in college but maybe I only finished that because I had to...can't remember my feelings while reading it...but I remember it as a masterpiece. Maybe this is too...unfortunately I'll never know because I just can't hold myself up on this anymore. Thank you for the opportunity to read and review.

This was my first book by the author and I wanted to love it but only liked it.

After a terrorist attack in which his wife dies, the enormously wealthy Nero Golden suddenly leaves his native country and comes to the States with his three flawed sons; one with Asperger's, one an alcoholic, one a ladies’ man and their half-brother who is conflicted about a woman. A second wife enters the picture with plans to inherit Nero's fortune.


The plot was unique and the characters unusual but I thought it dragged on in parts and the foreshadowing of impending gloom and doom went on too long. The narrator, Rene, is a film aficionado who throughout the story is gathering information to make a film on the family. The book is well written and challenges the reader with everything from Greek and Roman mythology, literature, movies and styles of movies, gender identity, American values, and the insanity of politics including the Trump presidency.

Did not finish. This sounded like a winner: from Salman Rushdie, winner of the Booker of Bookers for Midnight’s Children and set in New York with a loose allegory on Trump. I got about two-thirds of the way through it, and finding that I was not getting the momentum that some readers reported halfway through, I moved on to better things. The story is told from the perspective of a twenty-something American man who becomes intrigued (to say the least) with a family from an initially unnamed country that moves into his affluent neighborhood. The widowed patriarch is Nero Golden and his three sons are Petronius, Lucius Apuleius, and Dionysus. Nero is meant to be the Trump allegory, which you can tell because sometimes he says things like, “On the upper floors I can get a terrific deal . . . So, a great deal. The best deal in town.” My main problem with this novel was voice. I got bogged down in a conversation between the narrator and Nero about guns that didn’t indicate the speakers, and I couldn’t tell from their voice who was who. Both of them sounded like the elderly foreigner. I quit not long after that.

There were beautiful nuggets in Rushdie’s prose, to wit:

Life and death are both meaningless. They happen or don’t happen for reasons that have not weight, from which you learn nothing. There is no wisdom in the world. We are all fortune’s fools. Here is the earth and it is so beautiful and we are so lucky to be here with one another and we are so stupid and what happens to us is so stupid and we don’t deserve our stupid luck.

I was excited when I started this book in August, now it’s mid-October, and I am plowing through it – as in I am fast-reading/skimming because I am bored but so closed to finish. I realized that on my Kindle, my “time left in book” was turned off and then disappointed by how much was left.

Rushdie who I always like in principle but then I start reading I realize why I am still skeptical of his writing outside of “The Satanic Verses.” The writing in “The Golden House,” is bloated due to the complete fullness of elitism, pop culture and literature references that people with Masters and Doctorates or who are autodidactic will know. I am surprised that only a few references I have had to stop and look up. Rushdie mentions Stephen Colbert just after a sentence referencing P.G. Wodehouse.

“The Golden House,” is a Trumpian, Gatsbyian and Mythican story. It feels like Rushdie threw everything into this account including the kitchen sink and that is where it gets bogs down. Every sentence could be majestic by itself, and then he continues long paragraphs to which the writing lost in the magnitude of the 400 pages.

The story is about a family with the patriarch deciding to relocate to NYC and change their names to Roman gods for himself and his three sons. About the lies, fables, and truth they choose to tell. Joseph Campbell would be proud of the anti-hero arch that happens. Fitzgerald, if he would be alive today would either love or hate the work compared to his tightly written story (with is flaws). Fitzgerald would be happy with just being recognized.

As Rushdie is the author, I can't tell if he is writing in the moment because it feels like it or that he is writing about himself and about his time in America in the past twenty years. I can’t tell where the narrator because the author or the author becomes the narrator. Is he looking at his life or the life of Democracy to its death, much like Rome? I don't know.

Thanks to NetGalley for a copy of this ARC.