Golden opportunity

Rushdie rises to the challenge of Donald Trump’s United States

Anyone who has tried to write a novel can tell you that 400 pages in 18 months — never mind 400 good pages — is a prodigious work rate. But that’s precisely what Salman Rushdie has just accomplished, and he’s still feeling a bit shell-shocked.

“That’s lightning speed for me,” the India-born, New Yorkresident writer said on the phone from the Vancouver stop on his promotional round. “But I wanted to do something that, as a novelist, you’re not normally supposed to do: work very close to the present moment. If you do that wrong, of course, the book rapidly becomes as uninteresting as yesterday’s paper. But if you do it right, you can capture something in aspic. Years from now, when people read it, if anyone does, they might say, ‘Oh, that’s what it was like.’ ”

If there’s any justice, people will indeed be reading The Golden House, now and indefinitely. The book jumps into the top echelon of Rushdie’s 12 novels — it’s got the exuberance, comic vitality and world-creating ambition of early masterpieces Shame, Midnight’s Children and The Satanic Verses, but with an added heft of tragedy and urgency.

Set in New York City in the final months of the Obama era, the story of Indian expat billionaire Nero Golden and his three sons is, in some ways, a classic narrative of immigration and reinvention. The joker in the pack is, literally, The Joker. “A cackling, satirical presence on the edges of the novel,” in the author’s words, his resemblance to a certain current commander-in-chief is no accident.

Did Rushdie worry that, in conversations around the book, The Joker might take up all the oxygen in the room?

“Yes, I did worry, and now I realize I was right to,” he said.

“But really, it’s part of a terrible thing that is happening in America right now, which is that in every conversation, no matter the subject, within 10 minutes you’re talking about Trump. But he’s not really what the novel is about. He’s in there because I wanted to make some points about how cartoon villains are taking over the United States.”

An irony in the novel is that we see the Goldens largely through the eyes of a narrator — young filmmaker and Golden neighbour René — who believes the best way to tell their story is not to write about them, but to make a movie.

“That’s his view, not mine,” Rushdie stressed. “But I guess if I was in my 20s now, I might try to be René. Growing up in Bombay, a city absolutely obsessed with movies, it’s impossible not to become infected by the movie bug at an early age.”

Perhaps the most affecting character in the novel is youngest Golden son D, a sensitive soul struggling with his gender identity. The mere choice of such a figure carries its own risks, given the rapidly evolving contemporary conversation and vocabulary around gender.

“It is a difficult area, and for me that is a reason to try to do it,” Rushdie said. “But again, growing up in Bombay gives one a certain perspective. There has always been a substantial and very visible transgender community there, the Hijra. D Golden is more anguished about it, and I did that because it allowed me to explore the subject in a different way.”

A star of the book as much as any of the characters is their home city — the place where the author himself has lived for nearly 20 years. How does he feel about the oft-floated notion that New York is not really America?

“It’s true,” Rushdie said. “New York is a liberal, progressive, cosmopolitan area where 90 per cent of the electorate voted against Trump. But I don’t see why we have to accept that the view from Iowa or Alabama is the truer view. I don’t see why people who deny climate change and have racist and misogynistic ideas should be seen as the real world while New York isn’t.”

How has it been for Rushdie to venture north in the time of Trump?

“The predominant feeling is one of envy,” he said. “You have Justin Trudeau and we have Trump; you have health care and we have something that might soon be repealed. Somebody showed me a joke map on the internet which imagined a country in which Canada had expanded down both the east coast and the west coast of America. I thought, ‘Hey, that’s a pretty interesting country. Let’s have that one.’”

Speaking of Canada, one of the country’s favourite sons is clearly a Rushdie favourite, too. The Golden House is peppered with references and allusions to Leonard Cohen, as when René sings Bird on a Wire to his estranged girlfriend.

“That was going to be something else, but when I heard Cohen had died I decided to put it in as a kind of homage,” Rushdie said. “I met him once, when I presented an award to him on behalf of PEN. He was such a sweet man. I even have a photograph of myself being kissed by him. One of my most prized possessions.”

At 70, Rushdie finds himself in the rare position for a still-vital writer of being able to clearly see his own influence in the landscape. Midnight’s Children, especially, keeps gaining power through the years. How does he feel now about the young(er) man who wrote that book?

“I’m proud of him,” he said. “Though I have moved along a certain distance, in mostly good ways. I probably couldn’t write Midnight’s Children now, but then again, I don’t think he could have written The Golden House.”