RUSHDIE’S GRAND ILLUSION
Early in his new novel, The Golden House, Salman Rushdie describes one of his characters as “glittering-eyed and babbling like a brook”. “He talked and drank without stopping, and all of us who were there would carry fragments of that talk in our memories,” he writes, in what might be a description of his own dazzling tumult of words, allusions, and jokes. “What crazy, extraordinary talk it was!”
The Golden House has been compared to The Great Gatsby, an examination of the shopsoiled American dream. For Jay Gatz, the dream was Daisy, the girl born to America’s riches, the elusive prize, the symbol of belonging. Nero Golden is the mysterious immigrant at the centre of Rushdie’s novel. Like Gatz, Golden throws lavish parties. Both are figures of fantasy, darkness outlining their soft shimmering centres. Both seek to throw off the taint of their pasts and claim America for themselves. But is such reinvention possible?
Having fled Mumbai with his three sons after his wife was killed in the terrorist attacks of 2008, the guilt-ridden Golden repairs to his downtown Manhattan mansion—a benami acquisition—piquing the curiosity of his charmed neighbours whose houses back onto a shared garden, a private urban paradise. One of these neighbours is the ridiculously named Rene Unterlinden. Call me Rene, he faux-introduces himself, a nod to Melville that suggests Rene, like Nero and his sons, has recreated himself as a character in the tall tale, the ‘golden story’, he is spinning. Rene, in his 20s, the son of two college professors, is a writer of movies in search of a subject. The Goldens, he grasps, are that subject. What is it that makes them so determined to efface their old identities? We, Nero tells his sons to tell inquisitive neighbours, “are snakes who shed our skin... Tell them we materialised by magic... Say we are from nowhere or anywhere or somewhere, we are make-believe people, frauds, reinventions, shapeshifters, which is to say Americans.”
Rushdie has a comic-book sensibility. (Donald Trump appears as the Joker.) You’re surprised his chapters don’t end with ‘Pow!’, ‘Splat!’ or ‘Gadzooks!’ as the bodies pile up, mayhem is unleashed, and the plot swerves through contemporary New York, the art world, campus politics, the Mumbai mafia… A precis is beside the point. Each major character is impossibly outlandish; the novel is pure spectacle, like a summer blockbuster that distracts you from its incoherence with another explosion. But Rushdie is straining for more, for the depth of Classical tragedy, for the fairy tale’s strange power. The Golden House occasionally, as in the passages dealing with sexual identity, touches the bravura heights of 1980s Rushdie. Too often though it takes cover behind its showy garrulity, a corpulent, self-satisfied recycling of familiar tics where once it might have showed us something new.
THE NOVEL IS A CORPULENT AND SELFSATISFIED RECYCLING OF FAMILIAR TICS