Interesting book. I've never read his works before, so I didn't know what to expect.

I simply don't have enough body of reference or knowledge to understand this book, and so I cannot finish enough of it to provide a review.

The Golden House is told through the lens of Rene, an aspiring screenwriter. He follows the lives of Golden men. The patriarch of the family Nero and his sons Petya, Apu, and D all of whom chose their names and new identities upon emigrating to the US. Rene sees in his new neighbors, a story that needs to be told. He ingratiates himself into their lives. He becomes a friend and confidant to the brothers and a surrogate son to the father. He witness the rise and fall of each member of the family and eventually, unintentionally helps to contribute to the fall of Nero. Along the way he also discovers who he really is.

This is the first offering I have read from Rushdie. Obviously I didn't know what I was in for. You really need to pay attention when reading this book. The sentences are long but packed full of information. There were a couple times where I had to re-read what I had just finished. I sometimes felt the author got a little long winded as well. To me it was kind of like running a marathon to finish this book. I started out hopeful, had to really persevere in the middle, and was happy to reach the finish line. This does not mean I didn't enjoy it, it was a good read, I'm just not feeling it as much as others seem to. Perhaps I need to give Rushdie another try. I would still recommend others to pick this up and give it a try. Especially if you are already a Rushdie fan. Thanks to NetGalley and the publishers for allowing me an ARC for review.

<b> "The Golden House" is absolutely golden- rich in characters, plot and intrigue! A break out hit for 2017 for sure! </B>

Salman Rushdie weaves an engaging tale of the Golden family. I am in awe at how he pulls you in with pieces of information about the family while keeping in line with the American Political climate of that time. Rushdie walked a very thin line of keep the story on track while letting the readers know about the political landscape but he does it in the most engaging and thought provoking way.

The Golden family- Father and three sons shows up to the Garden community on the night Obama is inaugurated. No one knows anything about this family and the community is raging with speculation. The story is told from the next door neighbor's perspective- who happens to be a film maker- needless to say, the narration draws you in.

Honestly, I cannot remember the last time I read a book as enchanting as this. While the first 10% is as slow and painstaking as can be, the other 90% really picks up paces and grabs you. I have to so, I could not stop laughing at Rushdie's reference to "transbillionaire and identify as rich" that bit had be dying of laughter.

The most delicious read! I totally recommend this. (Thanks NetGalley for the ARC!)

Ah, this book is fantastic! :D I mean, it's Rushdie, who's surprised, but I do think this is by far the book of his I've loved the most.

The Golden family – Nero, the patriarch, and his three adult sons, Petronius (aka Petya), Lucius Apuleius (aka Apu), and Dionysus (aka D) – are newcomers to The Gardens, a small self-contained neighborhood in New York City, like a child's dreamy ideal of pre-hipster Greenwich Village. Their names, by the way, are all fake; the family is fleeing undisclosed trauma in an unnamed country (it's obviously India, but you have to get fairly deep into the book for that to be made explicit). Each adjusts, or doesn't, to their new life in America with varying degrees of success. Petya attempts to move past his severe autism and alcoholism, Apu makes a name as a celebrity artist, and D struggles to figure out his (or her) gender identity. Nero joins the construction industry, blasts his name across buildings, and acquires a Slavic trophy wife, but it's not quite fair to call him a Trump analogue; for one thing, Nero's far too smart and self-aware, not to mention capable of regret. In fact Trump himself is occasionally mentioned in the background, though he's always referred to as 'The Joker':
To step outside that enchanted—and now tragic—cocoon was to discover that America had left reality behind and entered the comic-book universe; D.C., Suchitra said, was under attack by DC. It was the year of the Joker in Gotham and beyond. The Caped Crusader was nowhere to be seen—it was not an age of heroes—but his archrival in the purple frock coat and striped pantaloons was ubiquitous, clearly delighted to have the stage to himself and hogging the limelight with evident delight. He had seen off the Suicide Squad, his feeble competition, but he permitted a few of his inferiors to think of themselves as future members of a Joker administration. The Penguin, the Riddler, Two-Face and Poison Ivy lined up behind the Joker in packed arenas, swaying like doo-wop backing singers while their leader spoke of the unrivaled beauty of white skin and red lips to adoring audiences wearing green fright wigs and chanting in unison, Ha! Ha! Ha!

All of this is narrated by René, a young man also living in the safety of The Gardens, a filmmaker with dreams of making a documentary about the Goldens, or perhaps just a movie starring a fictionalized version of them. René openly admits that he will combine characters or change details to fit his idea of how the story should go, which means it's always open to interpretation how much of what he's telling us is the truth.

It's a book that is bursting at the seams with stuff of all sorts: Greek myth, Roman history, Russian folklore, American politics, philosophy and melodrama, an enormous number of characters each of whom gets their own backstory, motivation, and secret thoughts, subplots and sub-subplots, dramatic revelations from the past that reappear unexpectedly, murders and fires, equal allusions to Kipling and mafia movies and the I ching, and even a secret baby. The writing is gorgeous, of course, and there's plenty to make you think, but what I was most surprised about was simply how compelling it was. I never wanted to put this book down, because I was so thrillingly engaged to find out what happened next. Just a really, really amazing book. I already want to reread it.

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2049629395

Salmon Rushdie new novel, <b>The Golden House</b> is a story about family, culture, and love. A wealthy man from Mumbai suddenly leaves India with his three sons and settles into an enclave of townhouses in Greenwich Village, NY. Nero Golden has adopted a new name for himself and his family, hoping, it seems, to escape his past in Mumbai. The townhouses where the Goldens live open to a beautiful communal garden shared with the residences of the quadrangle on Sullivan and Houston.<br><br>Rene, the son of a couple who lives in the townhouses, narrates the story. Rene's parents are both professors and Rene has only known the gardens, living there all his life. Rene is a film student and aspiring film maker, a believer in the auteur theory of cinema. He becomes friends with the sons of Nero Golden and tells their story and ours too. The time is 2008, and everyone in Rene's world is happy with Barack Obama, the new president. Hope is in the air. It seems that the Goldens are safe in their new home. Rene is innocent as are the three Golden boys. The story will unravel all hope and happiness for many.<br><br> To fully appreciate SR's novel, it will be helpful to know the great filmmakers. Much attention centers on the meaning of famous films and the connection with mythology. The 'Joker' (cue DJ Trump, Jr.) enters the picture on the periphery early, and we have him with us throughout the saga of the Goldens and Rene. Rushdie encapsulates absolutely everything happening in the USA from the beginning of the signs that Trump would run for president and even manages to include white supremacy, a foreshadowing of all we are living with now. No one can deny SR's genius and innate ability to gauge the temperature of civilization, either in the USA or India. It is a heartbreaking story from all sides, but we are given some small glimmer of hope from the author and must go on living our lives, as they are today.<br><br> Thank you to NetGalley, Salman Rushdie, and Random House for the opportunity to read this ARC.

The Golden House focuses on the Golden family made of three sons and their father. Because of his criminal doings,they flee their native country and reestablish in Manhattan. With new names and a fresh start, they ultimately rise and fall. The story is told by a neighbor in New York, a want-to-be filmmaker.

The first third of the book was a slog. I stopped and planned to go back and give it a second try. Four tries later and just past the halfway point, I concede. This is just not for me. It is heavy handed, dry and lacks something of the style I usually enjoy with Rushdie. The only parts that stuck with me were when he made clear commentary on the current political and social climate in the US. More of these small glimpses of perfection would have kept me reading.

It is complex and not an easy read.
Current affairs seem to be running through the story in a thoughtful way.
That said, I'm not sure I understand it.
It has left me deep in thought and that's always a good thing to find in a novel.

I really wanted to like this but - in the end the thick and meandering language caused me to put it down without finishing it.

I couldn't finish this pretentious, confusing book that had no direction that I could discern. I tried valiantly to finsish this book but my time was better spent elsewhere. I think Rushdie is an author who writes for himself and just expects readers to fall into line but this book was an unnecessary slog that Im sure will tons of awards because liking Salman Rushdie is what is to be expected by people giving awards.

Salman Rushdie’s 13th novel, The Golden House, plays out as a Shakespearean drama re-imagined in the eyes of a postmodernist and set in the Obama era of ultra-richeManhattan. (There, how’s that for an elevator pitch?) This novel is full of nostalgic references, ornate erudite descriptions and high-brow prose, as you would expect from the man who brought us Midnight’s Children and holds an esteemed Booker Prize. I, myself was first introduced to Salman Rushdie by Hanif Kureishi, who wrote one of my favorite college reads, The Black Album, in response to the fatwah issued by Islamic fundamentalists intent on killing Salman Rushdie for writing his 4th novel, The Satanic Verses. So, you can imagine the anticipation I felt to finally meet this great novelist and essayist up close and in person for myself—or as up close and in person as one’s words on a page will allow us to get to the true author themselves.

And here you have it. Sit back and imagine this:

The Golden House trots along the Obama era years, from his first inauguration on January 20, 2009, up to the election that gave us our 45th president. This political period is the mirror against which these characters see their lives unfolding, crumbling and transforming. Nero Golden and his household of three sons, of which he is the godlike patriarch, are expatriates of an unnamed country (which is eventually named) after a terrorist tragedy takes the life of their matriarch and shady financial deals finish them off in their homeland, sending the family to New York to rebuild their lives with the help of their obscene and conspicuous wealth by way of the American Dream. They move into a mega-mansion in an affluent neighborhood in Manhattan, where all 22 homes of the community back into a luxurious garden oasis that the families all collectively enjoy. It is in this near-utopian communal setting where lives begin to cross and our narrator, René, is met by the leading family. We follow him on his journey to infiltrate, observe and ultimately document the Golden lives in a film he’s been longing to make but isn’t really sure of how to go about doing. Along the way, characters come and go. As the modern-day “Julio-Claudian” drama unfolds, death occurs. Birth occurs. Marriage occurs. The saga of their lives unfolds, shatters, melts down and repairs—never in that order.

If you’re looking for a single word to describe this novel, a good starting place would be dense though I cannot argue that it is unnecessarily so, and the read certainly wouldn’t have been the same without this aspect. Literary allusions—call me Ishmael— abound on every page here and, quite honestly, you might want to have a digital encyclopedia on hand for quick reference through some of these passages— Chinese hexagrams of divination, for example? But I loved that, reveled in it for the most part, in fact, because this enlightened display of narrative talent played with so many forms of storytelling, from conventional narrative formatting to scenes written as screenplays, from the use of quotations marks to the use of not-a-one, and back again. It was a journey, but at least it was a ride too, crossing the lines of contemporary fiction, postmodernism and metafiction.

Here you’ll find wry social commentary that crackles and pops with dry irony, heaped on in healthy doses so that no culture—past or present, Eastern or Western—is safe from the scrutinizing eye—though, with the backdrop of this novel being set specifically against the Obama era, much of the commentary hits hard on American culture, smashing up against it forcefully and knocking down our perception of it, knocking down the barriers around talking about it, from Black Lives Matter to the collapse of the housing market to transgender transformation and everywhere in between:

“Once upon a time…if a boy liked pink and dolls his parents would be afraid he was homosexual and try to interest him in boy stuff…they might have doubts about his orientation but it wouldn’t occur to them to question his gender. Now it seems you go to the other extreme. Instead of saying the kid’s a pansy you start trying to persuade him he’s a girl.”

“What is American culture?” This novel dares to seriously ask—often pokes fun at—and ultimately explores—no, turns inside out—this beloved cliché we and the world over cling to called the American Dream, from the viewpoint of the transplant, from the viewpoint of those ultimately in search of themselves in the whirlwind that is our lives in our culture today.

“…I could feel it, the anger of the unjustly dead, the young men shot for walking in a stairwell while black, the young child shot for playing with a plastic gun in a playground while black, all the daily black death of America, screaming out that they deserved to live, and I could feel, too, the fury of white America at having to put up with a black man in white house, and the frothing hatred of the homophobes…the blue-collar anger of everyone who had been Fannie Mae’d and Freddie Mac’d by the housing calamity, all the discontent of a furiously divided country, everyone believing they were right…”

Rushdie’s insightful narrative is at times chilling it its acute accuracy about our cultural climate and our 45th president—“…the Joker shrieked…in that bubble…gun murderers were exercising their constitutional rights but the parents of murdered children were un-American…mass deportations would be a good thing; and women reporters would be seen to be unreliable because they had blood coming out of their whatevers…”— and made The Golden House a complete package, which managed to be both entertaining and at times mildly surreal, with the help of a wink toward a more avant-garde formatting technique and a nod toward the “magically real.”

I navigated this novel with the sense of one at their grandfather’s knee, he with brandy and cigar in hand, hearing a tale that was often fascinating in its baroqueness. The Golden House is chocked full of so many things we love in reads—solid plotting, whimsy and intellectual stimuli—which made the ornate density of this novel worth persevering through in the end—and that both stirred and excited my reader soul, like a hearty helping of literary gumbo you have to close your eyes and smile to enjoy, adding depth to the layers of the pages, of these words. And, that was easily enough for 4.5 stars. ****

This was a book that I really enjoyed and looked forward to getting back to every time I had to stop reading for a bit (you know those horrible moments when real life interferes with being able to read 24/7?). The story centers on a family of immigrants in New York, their mysterious past (exactly how did they make all that money?) and the relationships they forge in their new homeland.

The book is narrated by a friend of the family who is somewhat of an outsider to the very wealthy circles that Nero navigates, but the narrator is also a film maker who is in search of a story. Nero Golden and his family are the perfect subject for a documentary, and so the narrator begins working on this task but quickly becomes part of the sub plot within his own narrative.

The most intriguing aspect of this book for me was how Rushdie tackles of topics that are headlining our nightly news. Fiction is often the lens through which we see the world around us most clearly, and Rushdie does this adroitly. This was a great read.

Salman Rushdie is one of the greatest living writers in the world and few authors have his standing, not just as an author, but as a symbol of the vital importance of art and authorship. Perhaps because of his stature, he seems to feel obligated to tackle the big questions of society in many of his books. The Golden House is no different. Looking at the meaning of truth, identity, its reinvention, and family in the New York of Obama and Trump, this is another wide-ranging, all-encompassing novel.

The story is narrated by René, the son of Belgian academics who moved to New York, teach, and live in a house that backs up to a communal garden made by opening all the back yards into one shared space, a private park for the privileged few who live there. On the day Obama won the election, a family of mysterious origin, a father with three sons who have immigrated to America with great wealth and new names taken from the Roman emperors move into the grandest house in the garden. Their surname is Golden.

René wants to be a filmmaker and thinks this family is the stuff of cinema. He befriends them and is often at their home, even going on vacation with them to Florida. He learns their secrets. Their story is the stuff of Greek tragedy as their losses mount up and the father is ensnared by a Russian gold digger of mythological proportions.

The Goldens are a tragic family and as we learn their secrets, none of them are terribly surprising. There’s a lot of unnecessary obscurities. The secret country of origin, the terror attack that killed Nero Golden’s wife. They are real events so the elaborate not-naming of the country and the attack seems a waste of words. Even the grand reveal near the end is not a surprise as it’s been foreshadowed several times and anyone paying attention will have figured out the broad outline without the specifics.

I confess I am was disappointed in The Golden House. I expected it to become one of my favorite books of the year like Shalimar, the Clown or Midnight’s Children. Instead, I frequently found myself checking my progress, like a child in the back seat asking “Are we there yet?” I wanted the book to be over. It’s not that I wanted to quit unfinished, I just wanted to be done. I wanted to find out what happened, but it was such a chore to wade through it all. René could not seem to describe an event without dredging up every book and film that had some comparable or contrasting scene to compare with it. This could go on for pages and, too often, it did.

Through it all, there is this running commentary about society, some of it very curmudgeonly. As though René were a querulous old man shaking his cane and snarling about “Kids nowadays.” It sounds so odd as he is a youthful filmmaker. It seems as though René fades and Rushdie speaks through him because he often sounds like a grumpy, old fart.

The middle son is questioning his identity and his place on the gender spectrum. While the idea that people must not always be assigned a label is a liberating one, there seemed to be this grudge in Rushdie’s writing about the trans community and genderqueer activism. D sees a therapist who is a bad caricature of a dogmatic ideological enforcer culled from twitter rants. There’s a contemptible joke about a transbillionaire that gets trotted out twice.

On the other hand, his raging indictment of our national aversion to education, facts, news, truth, and integrity made my blood sing. If you love rants condemning the stupidity, the racism, the anti-Americanism of the people who voted for the Joker, as Donald Trump is called in the book, you will love that part. I sure did.

Don’t get me wrong, a disappointing Rushdie book is still better than the average book by a mile. I still think Rushdie is a great writer whose prose can have the rushing, headlong power of a raging river. He creates characters who are unique and intriguing and stories that are complex. He has important ideas to write about and interesting stories to tell. But he gets in his own way.

I can’t tell you how many times I was reading another never-ending list of literary and cinematic allusions while wondering if it would ever end. Some went on for pages. I read just one example to a friend, a short one at that, where René runs through a list of first names of directors and before I got to the end, my friend said “Stop! Stop! I can’t take it.” It was torturous. But why? Why is so much of the book flooded with literary listicles?

Rushdie rages against the anti-elitism that poisons America, that made so many of us so stupid as to vote for the Joker when we knew he was corrupt, racist, and rapacious. Is he shoving his cultural literacy in our faces to remind us that the elite are elite because they know things? I don’t think the people who despise intellect and expertise are likely to pick up Rushdie’s books in the first place. I don’t think Rushdie’s readers need a reminder that he is culturally literate. Familiarity with his work is part of being culturally literate, so what’s the point?

It feels like blasphemy to not like Rushdie’s book – especially since I have loved his others so much. It took me nearly ten days to read The Golden House because I constantly had to take a break, not to stop and think about the story, but because I was frustrated by the artifice of the unnamed country and the tedium of the constant cultural references. I wish I had liked it more. Instead, with such disappointment, I feel downright curmudgeonly.

The Golden House will be released September 5th. I received an e-galley in advance from the publisher through NetGalley.

Very interesting characters, and the author writes as if he were just talking to someone, just telling a story to them.

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 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.

Searching for the right words to describe this book, Rushdie's 13th, and my very first foray into his oeuvre, the best thing I can come up with is hot mess. Overblown, bombastic in parts, melodramatic most of the way through, mind-numbingly boring in others, pinged with moments of social satire and brilliance.

I'm such a rule follower. I received the ARC of this book from Netgalley and felt a duty to finish this book and write this review, hence, I finished this book, to its very last page. If I were more free spirited, like many of my brilliant, book-abandoning, life-is-too-short friends, I would not have slogged my way through the first THIRD of this book, in which nothing actually happens, and the very annoying narrator continually alludes to things happening in the future in a very overwrought and unnecessarily mysterious fashion.

The story revolves around the Golden family, three sons lead by their criminal father, who, because of his criminal associations, leave their country of origin and reinvent themselves in Manhattan. They all take very poncey new names, and are ultimately punished for this disingenuous reinvention.

The narrator is a neighbour who somehow inveigles into the family. He's a wannabe filmmaker, and thus his narrative is positively peppered with pop culture references (movies, books, and the like) to the point where my throat burned with the over-spiciness of it all. Instead of being enjoyable, it felt overdone and try-hard and exhausting to read.

The rise and fall of this family is elevated to ridiculous levels of importance. But, where Rushdie really got my attention is when he began making timely connections between the state of the nation (during the time leading up to the current U.S. presidential election) and the state of the Golden house, writing some incredible, damning passages that leave no ambiguity to his feelings towards the 45th president. These passages are powerful, stunning and show a fiery mastery of political/social commentary.

"In that bubble, razor-tipped playing cards were funny, and lapel flowers that sprayed acid into people's faces were funny, and wishing you could have sex with your daughter was funny, and sarcasm was funny even when what was called sarcasm was not sarcastic, and lying was funny, and hatred was funny, and bullying was funny, and bigotry was funny, and bullying was funny, and the date was, or almost was, or might soon be, if the jokes worked out as they should, nineteen eighty-four."

The parallels between Golden and the current president (referred to as the Joker) are unmistakable, even Golden's somewhat entertaining Melania-like second wife. However, I found it rambling, overwritten and heavy handed. Not terribly compelling for me, as a novel.

The world has turned a cacophony of unrelenting voices, where people in high offices as well as pedestrian consorts battle every day to be one up. The lines have blurred as issues have bulldozed their way, against most conventions, right into our living rooms, and administrative, as well as clandestine, powers are clashing regularly, and vehemently, across continents over the fatal flames of terrorism, corruption, religion and human rights. Bringing together these critical elements under a sprawling tale of love, ambition, deception and collapse is what ‘The Golden House’ is all about.

On one silent day, when Nero Golden, the enigmatic, octogenarian patriarch of a family of four, tip-toes into a lavish mansion in downtown Manhattan, the neighbours’ antennae go up without exception. Nothing is known about the family – its past, its roots, its business, its relations. Nero’s three sons, Petya, Apu and D wander under equally mysterious pseudonyms and their circle remains sanctified of any unfamiliar trouble. Filthy rich and unusually secretive, they, at once, catch the fancy of their 20-something neighbour, René, an aspiring filmmaker whose search for a subject to feed his magnum opus had, till then, been elusive. The façade might have worked well had not a Russian missile come surreptitiously and hit the Goldens with scorching heat one evening – the ravishing Vasilisa. The tremors she sends across the bricks of the Golden House impales the garbs of its inhabitants and in their vulnerable faces, we gradually see, a lot of us.

Chronicling the USA of Obama and Trump, Sir Rushdie writes with his trademark erudition and flamboyance, taking digs at the political mayhem the American soil has gotten embroiled into. From outright flimsy reasons triggering furore, to the politically-driven human rights issues, and to even likening the current Presidential rule to the Orwellian 1984 world, he spins the febrile web of the socio-political fabric of America with surgical precision. Closer home, he doesn’t spare the vandals of now-inevitable secularistic dissent and terrorist attacks. 26/11 Mumbai is invoked, and so is the abhorrent slavery to corruption, and the mastery of Sir Rushdie lies in bringing these two worlds, that of America and India, so tantalizingly close, and to a common ground of the bizarrely chaotic. While oscillating between the cinematic advent of Marvel Comics binge and the 1992 Mumbai blasts, Gamergate and beef ban, one recognizes this work to be a dazzling collage of double zeitgeist, not to be missed.

On the humane and moralistic aspects, Sir Rushdie’s prose swells like air and fills the narrative space with believable characters that are strong yet flawed. I found the Golden brothers to bear uncanny resemblance to the three brothers in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov; why, even the eldest one is named Petya! Well, the genteel characterization of their strengths and fears, their shrewdness and vulnerability, points towards a place where they reflect the society we live in and in some way, become our kin. One might be tempted to give a bear hug to D who grapples under an identity crisis, or an evening to Petya whose agoraphobia warrants a walk in the nearby Gardens, or a lift to Apu whose demons come to haunt him. Whether it is the fight to keep the René -Suchitra relationship alive or the urge to stall the arrival of Alzheimer into Nero’s life, under the pitch-dark skies of seduction and treachery, lies and loss, the reader shall encounter redeeming sunshine of gender acceptance, infallible love, filial loyalty and intellectual futility.

Making our narrator, René, a filmmaker, turns out to be a very smart move. Apart from sprinkling generous movie recommendations like Volker Schlöndorff’s ‘Swann in Love’ , Robert Wiene’s 'The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari’ and Satyajit Ray’s ‘Pather Panchali’, the narrator’s profession facilitates to keep the viewfinder largely unrestricted despite the limitation of a first-person account. His role provides the book’s structure, a legitimate trail of imagination wherein he can relay a scene which he wasn’t privy to and yet, pass it with the stamp of veracity.

Can a person be both good and evil?

The Golden House is a towering novel, carrying sagacious meditation on human emotions and desires, and weaving their many threads into weapons that slither too close, issuing a resounding warning on the incredible proximity we have with one another and reminding us, no place, no matter how far and how conducive, can absolve us of our past.

[Note: Thanks to Netgalley, Salman Rushdie and Random House for providing me an ARC.]

The Golden House by Salman Rushdie
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Thanks to Netgalley for a copy of this ARC!

I've always had Rushdie in my rear-view mirror it seems. He keeps cropping up everywhere and I always meant to read Satanic Verses for the big hubbub it made back in the day. You know, the whole assassination thing. And yet, I never actually got a round to reading him.

And then, out of the blue, I see a chance. Netgalley. I jumped on it and was pleasantly surprised to get it. And then I read my very first Rushdie.

Expectations are a tricky thing. I rather thought I was going to get a heavy literary novel full of references and mythology bubbling beneath the circus, if not surface, of the text. What I got was exactly that, but more-so, because I was engrossed in something so very readable and enjoyable that I never once had to really WORK at it. You know?

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.

Indeed, my own references were carefully considered and a careful reader will know what to expect if they pick this novel up. :)

It was pretty awesome, all told. The search and the apparent finding and confusion of identity is a very major theme, whether told as the story of Nero Golden, the patriarch, or through any of his sons who are as bright as those in Brothers Karamazov, or through the identity of our unreliable narrator, the house-guest and future filmmaker of the House of Golden.

But let me be honest here... I'd have read and enjoyed this novel just for the sequences about the rise of the Joker in politics. :) That stuff was GOLDEN.

And indeed, all of this was clever and fascinating and the looming tragedy of the family always kept me glued to the page as if I was rubbernecking a particularly bad auto accident. And it was beautiful. I don't know what that says about me, but I certainly love a good tragedy. It was lurid and fantastical and gaudy as if we were reading about Gatsby which, indeed, there was made multiple references.

Above all, this is a very modern book full of modern post-truth America and the lies that we see with our right eyes and the distorted truths of our left. I can honestly recommend this as a great and fun read. All those accolades that Rushdie seems to be getting are well deserved. He's one hell of a writer.

This book draws you in from the start. Deep and fascinating reading, with characters you want to get to know. Recommend!!

Salman Rushdie's ambitious new novel follows the rise and fall of an immigrant family, from the giddy dawn of the Obama era up through the surreal election of Trump (referred to as "The Joker"—Rushdie doesn't pull his punches when it comes to 45). A patriarch and his three sons have left India under mysterious circumstances (possibly related to the 2008 terrorist incidents in Mumbai) and have, upon arrival, renamed themselves the Goldens. They quickly come to the voyeuristic attention of their New York neighbor, an aspiring filmmaker who serves as our narrator. And so begins this crazy tale with crazy characters set in this crazy era.

This is my first Rushdie novel, and I'm not convinced that he and I are a good match. I acknowledge his formidable writerly talent: he spins a good yarn; he's sarcastic and satirical; he has broad cultural knowledge; he wrestles with diverse and timely and important themes. These things all impress me, sometimes deeply. But he is also unruly and overwhelming, and his narrative excesses and theatricality are not for me. There's a showiness to his writing, with tedious tangents and flagrant foreshadowing, and I was over it by the eleventh-hour reveals. The female characters in particular left me suspicious and borderline offended; his characters in general come across as incapable of emotional sophistication, nuance, empathy, and self-awareness. I will concede that a whole lot of this comes down to personal taste, though; I'm not surprised by the positive attention this novel has received, and I suspect it will get a lot more in the coming months.

Thank you to the publisher and to NetGalley for the opportunity to read and review this pre-publication.