A gritty fairy tale for our time
The Golden House, the new novel from Booker Prize winner Salman Rushdie, is a fairy tale about an “uncrowned seventy-something king,” Nero Golden, who, in the wake of tragedy, moves with “his three motherless” adult sons to a mythic land of wonders and hope. Well, sort of. The mythic country to which the four men emigrate is, in fact, the United States during the years of the Obama presidency. And Nero isn’t quite a king; he’s a mysterious billionaire who settles in “the palace of his exile,” an exclusive New York enclave following the death of his wife. Or at least that’s what he claims. The truth, as one might expect, is altogether more complex.
The great strength of The Golden House is Rushdie’s ability to balance the fairy tale tone of the story with the gritty realities both of the family’s life in New York and their gradually revealed past. The novel is narrated by their neighbour Rene, an aspiring filmmaker, who insinuates himself within the Goldens’ apartment and lives, observing them and uncovering their stories, much like Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby, involved but detached from the events he is recounting in what can best be described as a storyteller’s voice. “The Goldens were my story,” he writes, in a narrative that wheels seemingly out of control through lengthy di- gressions and sharp turns before coming into sharp, and powerful, focus.
The Gatsby overtones are but one of a multitude of associations and references Rushdie threads through the novel, drawing on literary, historical, mythic and pop cultural sources. Take the names. Nero has chosen the name of the great — and ill-fated — Roman emperor, opening the novel to associations which explode, literally, in full force in its closing pages. It’s no accident that the curator of the Museum of Identity is named Orlando Wolf. Or take the candidate running in the 2016 election, whom Rushdie refers to only as the Joker, from the pages of the Batman com- ics, about whom “everyone, passionate supporters and bitter antagonists, was agreed: he was utterly and certifiably insane . . . people backed him because he was insane, not in spite of it.”
That conceit, and Rushdie’s treatment of it, is reminiscent of the novel as a whole: it begins as a clever metaphor, veers almost into selfdestructive excess before becoming something not only true, but profound and moving. Mystery, tragedy, family drama, coming of age story, romance, myth, satire, and on, and on — in its glorious excess, The Golden House is a fairy tale for our time. Robert Wiersema’s latest book is Black Feathers.