A TRUMPIAN NOVEL SET IN NEW YORK’S BUBBLE
THE GOLDEN HOUSE By Salman Rushdie 380 pages Available at National Book Store
An idiosyncratic billionaire with an odd tan takes over a Manhattan property that is reportedly built on a solid gold foundation, bringing with him whispered tales of Gatsby-like intrigues in his past, ex-wives and three odd, feuding sons, as meanwhile, in the wings, a Russian connection awaits.
Does it sound like arch novelist Salman Rushdie is writing a gloss on the Trump era? Well, his latest, The Golden House, does takes place during the inauguration of a US president, but it’s not Trump: it’s the Obama era that our narrator, René Unterlinden’s, eyes are focused on. Any similarities to the gossipy squabbles and financial swindles of New York City where a certain gold-gilted Tower still stands are, of course, expected — and expected to be entertaining.
Nero Golden, the Trump avatar, bears passing resemblances to the orange-haired one that are hard to ignore. (“It was difficult to know how wealthy Nero Golden actually was,” the narrator says at one point. “His name was everywhere in those days, on everything from hotdogs to for-profit universities.”) But eventually, those echoes seem more like red herrings. Once you get past the initial flight of Rushdie’s feathery pen, you settle into a shaggy dog story that charts what happens when a certain family from “a country that had no name” settles into the melting cauldron of NYC, among the rich and faintly disreputable.
It’s a fair assumption that our billionaire with real estate ties from a country of unspoken nomenclature will turn out to be Indian (one senses it from the start, if only from the culinary references); Rushdie here returns to exploring the churning turmoil of American culture — the haves of Downtown Manhattan, the have-nots of faraway exotic lands, as well as the homeless occupying your local street corners — as the story unfolds in a period of promised racial equality and parity (“HOPE” was the pumped-up slogan during Obama’s early days). Obama is not much more than an offstage character here, just as the vague Trump allusions exist as a shimmering shadow. We basically get Rushdie’s insights into an era in which the author himself was winding down from a fatwa in a very rich, urban metropolis and taking copious notes. Some have complained that the resulting novel amounts to a triumph of googling, that it’s a “listicle disguised as a novel” (and there are copious pop cultural references tossed in as seasoning) but they often said the same thing about novelist Tom Wolfe, who in pre-internet days never tired of charting the ups and downs of the rich and restless of Manhattan (see: Bonfire).
Rushdie’s writing style is, itself, a gilted pleasure. Never one to harness his pen, the prose flows like rich bolts of tailored cloth, like the ones found in Bonfire of the Vanities or maybe American Psycho. But we’re in the Aughts here, not the Eighties, and The Golden House offers a tale of a man who espies a subject for his Great American Novel in the Obama era: the next-door glittering home of Nero Golden is as entrancing to our narrator — whose modest-means academic Belgian parents expect Great Things from him — as Jay Gatsby was to Nick Carraway in that past-century tale of a Gilded Age. (You know, the one that starred Leo DiCaprio.)
Despite all the hoopla, Rushdie still knows how to tell a tale, and this one, embroidered with all its puffedup finery, is entertaining enough to plow through. The three brothers have their issues, the youngest halfbrother, D (short for Dionysus), being a man of fluid gender. The other two, Petya (a brilliant recluse, possibly with Asperger’s) and Apu, a downtown portrait artist, battle against their aging dad’s new imported arm candy, the sly 28-year-old Russian gymnast Vasilisa. It does sound a little clichéd, come to think of it, but after all, we are now living in an era where an actual US president has his own imported Eastern Bloc arm candy (Wife No. 3), and a scurry of sons who bumble and fumble and generally skirmish over Dad’s activities. If this is indeed the age of post-truth, one side effect is that truth can easily resist being pinned down by satire. So pick your poison: scan the news for your tabloid entertainment, or scan the fictional towers constructed by Rushdie.
As the plot thickens — accents and all — we come to see the early threads of Russian influence on Manhattan’s money-go-round. The headlines we read about money laundering through New York banks (including ones where Donald J. Trump now parks his loans) play a part here, as do early buds of transgender activism and the Occupy Wall Street movement, which may not have achieved much, except waking up a few minds to how the haves control the have-nots.
René becomes pals with the three sons, and it’s his POV that guides us through the art gallery openings and cocktail parties and drunken downtown revels. What emerges is a sense of the “bubble” that separates the truly wealthy of New York (and Los Angeles, and Washington, DC) from the other “bubbles” only then starting to seal themselves off in rural parts of America. (The rural bubbles that would eventually elect Trump.)
Bitter passages about the motives of beautiful women (“Ignore a beautiful woman for too long and there will be trouble. How long is too long? Five minutes”), plus the vulturelike characteristics of Vasilisa, might raise the hackles of feminists and casual readers nowadays, though this is perhaps predictable fallout from Rushdie’s reportedly bitter divorce from model/TV host Padma Lakshmi. (He is said to have called her “a bad investment.”) Still, passages like “She was like a snake who could slip in and out of many different skins, slithering from this to that, with her little forked tongue licking at the corners of her lips, adoring herself and being adored, dressing, as snakes do, to kill” tend to sting a bit much.
Does it feel at some points like Rushdie is filtering his prose through a nonstop stream of New York Times, Newsweek and CNN news feeds in trying to capture the zeitgeist? Maybe. But here, at least, Rushdie sinks his teeth into a turf — Manhattan — that has as many threads and entanglements as his country of birth. If not Dickensian, The Golden House is certainly a product of the times.