Obama, Trump elections provide backdrop for Rushdie’s new book

TORONTO — Salman Rushdie says the idea of setting his latest novel between two historic U.S. elections came to him late, but the contrast between Barack Obama and Donald Trump's presidencies provided the perfect backdrop for his modern American fable.

“I knew I was going to try to write a fairly contemporary social novel about this particular moment; but to actually have that structure going across those eight years was not there at the beginning,” the celebrated author said in a phone interview from New York.

“Once I thought of it, I thought: ‘That gives it an interesting arc.’ Unfortunately, given what happened in the election last year, the arc became, in a way, more formally satisfying to go from a moment of great optimism to, in a way, its opposite.”

The Golden House (Random House) opens on the day of Obama’s inauguration, where a billionaire and his children arrive in New York. The family heads to the Macdougal Sullivan Gardens Historic District in Greenwich Village — or “the Gardens,” for short — to live in the former Murray mansion, now rebranded as the Golden House.

Rushdie said the setting is based on a reallife communal garden where his friends live, and seemed like an ideal environment for the novel’s drama to unfold.

“It seemed like a stage on which the action could take place. That made me think of (the film) Rear Window because everybody could spy on everybody else’s lives,” said Rushdie. “The fact is, the house on which (Alfred) Hitchcock based Rear Window is on Christopher Street, which is like 100 yards away.”

The patriarch called Nero Golden resides with his three sons: the reclusive Petya, flamboyant artist Apu and the youngest boy, D., who is carrying a deep secret.

“I think they come to New York to reinvent, not to disappear,” Rushdie said of the mysterious Goldens. “Nero Golden in New York is leading a very ... business, entrepreneurial life. But they feel — as it turns out erroneously — that they can escape their past by coming this far. And the fact that they’re wrong about that is part of the tragedy of the book.”

The Goldens are seen through the lens of their neighbour, Rene, a budding young filmmaker who insinuates himself in their lives as research for a movie on the family. The novel itself takes on a cinematic quality, complete with the use of techniques reminiscent of the making of a big-screen epic. It was a storytelling structure that proved freeing for Rushdie.