THERE ARE HOUSES IN NEW YORK WHICH I KNOW WHERE NOBODY LIVES.

mash-up of a recent British Wimbledon champion’s surname and a tennis service term. Apu’s art dealer is named Frankie Sottovoce, a pulpy racketeer’s name in a novel that liberally references both comics and The Godfather (Nero renames a figure from his tragic past as “Don Corleone,” and Nero’s second wedding is compared to the one that opens Coppola’s trilogy). And finally, the New York of the novel is in the midst of its own adaptation: “Construction work was the city’s new brutalist art form, erecting its installations wherever you looked.”

Nero Golden is at the heart of this, erecting buildings with his name in gold (sound familiar?). “This was a powerful man,” René says, “no, more than that – a man deeply in love with the idea of himself as powerful.” Is it simply ego, though? An American face for an imported oligarch? “The business of America is business. This is what I believe,” Nero says (without citing Calvin Coolidge). Or is it rather a manifestation of guilt

The U.S. presidential campaign isn’t the only motif from 2016 that weaves its way into The Golden House. A grace note in its denouement is the appearance of Leonard Cohen’s “Bird on the Wire,” to remind us of what will doubtlessly be a year also remembered for its celebrity musician deaths. Rushdie met Cohen in 2012 when asked to present the songwriter with the PEN Song Lyrics Award, and despite having a different song in mind to cement the relationship of René and Suchitra, he changed it after Cohen’s death “as a kind of tip of the hat.” (Humorously, “Don Corleone” marries a starlet whose name, translated, means “Goldie” – while Goldie Hawn’s 1990 vehicle Bird on a Wire is named for a Neville Brothers cover of Cohen’s song.) In another elegiac moment, if unintended, Murray Lett and Peyta see Soundgarden at Jones Beach; the band’s singer Chris Cornell would pass away as the book was in production.

It’s hard not to read The Golden House, despite its satire, as an elegy for many things. Decency. Privacy. Perhaps just the masks with which we’re comfortable, rather than the ones we revile. It’s hard not to wonder whether the characters who leave the story have exited the stage, or escaped the building, leaving us inside with our hysteria.