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Tuesday, September 5, 2017

Review of THE GOLDEN HOUSE by Salman Rushdie (New Release)

4 Stars
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.

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