Tuned in to the times
Rushdie’s novel zeros in on nationalism, free speech, addiction, gender identification
Man Booker Prize winner Salman Rushdie, who makes a stop in Vancouver Tuesday to discuss his new book, delves into society’s most talked-about subjects in The Golden House.
On stage Salman Rushdie in Conversation Tuesday, 7:30 | Chan Centre for the Performing Arts Tickets: $30-$50 at tickets.ubc.ca
For years the main player in his new novel The Golden House has been on Salman Rushdie’s mind.
Nero Golden is a wealthy, often wretched, real estate magnate who along with his three adult sons and a trunk full of secrets fled India and the Bombay mafia to start new lives with new identities in New York City.
“The beginnings of the story were in Bombay. I only gradually came to understand Nero would end up in New York and the story would primarily take place in New York,” said Rushdie, who has lived in NYC since 1999. “So the whole thing about his journey, what he does with his life et cetera came slowly, but the sense of who he was and what would happen to him I had in my head for a decade. That isn’t unusual for me. Things sit in my head for a really long time before they end up on the page.
“Yes, I guess I have all these parasites in my head,” Rushdie added with a laugh.
With all these thoughts and threads sizzling across his synapse you have to wonder if the Man Booker Prize winner (1981’s Midnight’s Children) ever has a quiet moment or gets a good night’s sleep.
“I’m out like a light,” said the 70-year-old writer about laying his head down at the end of the day. “I’ve always been like that.”
Always? Even when he was a hunted man after Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini issued the fatwa against him on charges of blasphemy for his novel The Satanic Verses in 1989?
“I slept like a baby all the way through it,” said Rushdie, admitting that at the time his slumberous state was surprising to him as well.
He is threat free these days and is very much out of hiding as he is travelling extensively promoting his new work.
“It is fun actually. I am having quite a nice time,” said Rushdie, on the phone recently from a tour stop in San Francisco.
The Golden House book tour will land in Vancouver at the Chan Centre for the Performing Arts on Tuesday.
“What doesn’t get old for me is meeting readers in different cities and talking to them,” said Rushdie. “Writers don’t meet their readers that often, you know, once every few years. That part is just as enjoyable as it ever was.”
The doings in The Golden House, Rushdie’s 12th novel, makes him look very prescient as it zeros in on today’s most talked about subjects. Nationalism, free speech, political correctness, addiction, gender identification, autism and the absurdity of modern politics are all plot points that help to frame the fast-paced tale. Oh and Vancouver readers (real estate agents aside) will be happy to see Rushdie point out the ills of the super rich’s penchant for buying up properties and leaving them empty just because they can.
“I think it is incredibly damaging to the life of a city to have these kind of ghost buildings you know,” said Rushdie. “It destroys neighbourhoods. It destroys communities. It’s very, very damaging.”
Timely stuff for sure but what really makes this story eerily familiar is the appearance of a Trumpian politician nicknamed The Joker complete with the colourful, cartoonish look of the original DC Comics baddie.
However, Rushdie is quick to point out that he had most of the novel written prior to Nov. 8 and Donald Trump’s win.
“My book kind of guessed right even though I was wrong,” said Rushdie. “The work of art can often be wiser than the artist and I think that was so in this case.”
While The Joker careens around the novel he and his ludicrous and distasteful deeds are not the focus. The story sits firmly with Nero and his family who Rushdie uses as a gateway to make his wider points on wealth, power, corruption and crime.
“I think it is really difficult to talk about the American dream right now. This is such a fractured country,” said Rushdie, who became a U.S. citizen almost two years ago. “The motto of the United States is actually out of many, one, e pluribus unum. It doesn’t feel like that right now so I think there isn’t a whole lot of American dreaming going on. What I was trying to use was the portrait of a fracturing family and around that make a larger portrait of a fractured country. Literally one inside the other.”
The Golden House is narrated by René, a neighbour and a filmmaker who is looking for a story. Soon though he becomes part of the story.
The inclusion of a narrator and the theme of re-invention have lead many to call this work Rushdie’s Gatsby.
But while a comparison to the F. Scott Fitzgerald masterwork is obviously not a bad thing, Rushdie explains his narrator is crucially different than Fitzgerald’s omnipresent Nick Carraway
“I think there is a moment he thinks he is Nick, but I don’t think he is because Nick Carraway would never make the mistake of getting involved in the lives of Gatsby and Daisy,” said Rushdie. “He would never cross that boundary between the observer and the participant. Nick is always on the edge looking in and René is not.
“I thought at first he would be a surrogate for the reader but he wasn’t content with that, he wanted to be part of the story. So at a certain point he becomes a very crucial part of the story.”
Rushdie does concede that Nero and his sons do operate like Gatsby reinventing themselves to conceal a checkered past. But Gatsby did that for love. The Goldens, well, they’ve got other reasons.
If you are going to reinvent yourself or start over New York is certainly open to helping you with your quest. In fact, Rushdie himself headed to Gotham after the fatwa was lifted. There, he shed his code name Joseph Anton (the title of his 2012 memoir), the confines of a security silo and became a New Yorker.
“I’m part of the furniture now,” said Rushdie, reflecting on his almost two decades in NYC.
Does it seem like a lifetime since the alias, fake bank accounts, secret houses and, of course, the constant threat of assassination?
“Yes it does. It feels like a very long time ago,” said Rushdie. “As I say, I have lived in New York 19 years now. It hasn’t been an issue throughout that time. It went on for long enough.
“Basically that was my forties. When the trouble began I was 41 or something. By the time life went back to something like normal I was 50. Basically, I lost my forties to that but now I’m 70 so it’s a long time.”
Rushdie’s move to New York and his decision to become a U.S. citizen was greatly fuelled by one of America’s cornerstone qualities.
“One of the things that attracted me is the First Amendment’s very broad defence of free expression and I think that is still valuable,” said Rushdie. “Clearly, there are some people here testing the limits of that. I think carrying Nazi flags down the streets of Charlottesville is testing the limits of free expression. They’re wrong, but one of the things about the free speech camp is you are constantly finding yourself defending people you don’t like. You always have to defend the other side.”
Rushdie believes transparency is a must when dealing with extremism and nativism. At the end of the day, it is much better the devil you know.