Trump-like figure rules Rushdie’s ‘Golden House’

Nero is a study in morals and ethics

It’s not hard to identify a key inspiration for Nero Golden, the patriarch at the center of Salman Rushdie’s 13th novel, The Golden House (Random House, 380 pp., eeeg out of four).

He’s a New Yorker who “has been a deal-maker all his life.” He’s a 70-something man who believes “the only virtue worth caring about was loyalty.” And he is “a man deeply in love with the idea of himself as powerful.”

Nero isn’t a facsimile of President Trump, but he’s unmistakably Trump-ish, and our current brackish political atmosphere colors The Golden House, which ranks among Rushdie’s most ambitious and provocative books. Its story stretches from the first Obama inauguration to the present day, with Nero and his family serving as symbols for America’s current identity crisis. It captures Rushdie’s concern that America’s “dark side ... roared out of its cage and swallowed us.” Nero arrives in Greenwich Village from his native India, widowed under foggy circumstances, with three sons, each bearing heavy baggage. One is an alcoholic who handles romantic rejection catastrophically; one is an artist who strains to reconcile his Occupy politics with his father’s wealth; and one is struggling with his gender identity. But Nero is distracted by money, politics, a trophy wife and ill-kept secrets.

Narrating the family’s fortunes is René, a family friend who aspires to make a movie about the Goldens from a documentarian’s remove. But he can’t help but become enmeshed in the drama. That’s one of Rushdie’s warnings: Spend enough time around the “unmistakable smell of crass, despotic danger,” and soon enough you’ll start stinking, too.

Given its themes, the novel is a somber departure from the fablelike, comic style that has been Rushdie’s signature since his 1981 breakthrough, Midnight’s Children. But Golden still displays the quicksilver wit and playful storytelling of Rushdie’s best work.

Through René, he weaves in screenplay dialogue and smash cuts, adding some snap to his typically labyrinthine prose. Nor has Rushdie lost his preternatural capacity to mash up mythology, religion, history and pop culture. Pick your classic hubristic figure — Oedipus, Lear, Gatsby — and you’ll hear him echoed in Nero.

But underneath all the references is a more basic concern about the nature of good, evil and our capacity for change. René repeatedly contemplates the “supposed innate ability of the human mind to realize the basic principles of ethics and morals.” If it’s not innate, how do we learn it? And if it is, why does it unravel so easily, so often?

To address the question, Rushdie makes his Nero a study in conflicts — magnanimous but corroded, generous yet neglectful. In the process, Rushdie illuminates America’s conflicted self, too, where good and evil are in “an uncomfortable and perhaps irreconcilable alliance.”

That’s the stuff of a classic tale of a larger-than-life figure. But matched with Rushdie’s interest in arrogance, power, and family, Nero Golden’s story also feels a lot like reading the news.

RANDALL SLAVIN