‘The Château’ takes satirical look at Trump, America
Once upon a time, Melsor Katzenelenbogen was a celebrated Moscow poet and Soviet-Jewish refusenik. Now he’s a right-wing octogenarian living in Florida on the proceeds of a Medicare scam, while proudly proclaiming that “Trump reminds me of me.”
“What made you give up on decency?” asks 52-year-old son Bill, hero of Paul Goldberg’s “The Château,” his second novel and a scathing satire of Trump’s America. “You threw it out like a used condom. What made you so smug? Do you even understand what I’m saying?”
We’re not given answers to these questions; as with most satire, “The Château” paints with a broad brush in castigating the way things are rather than exploring why Melsor and legions like him have betrayed their best selves, while growing criminally selfish and mean.
But Goldberg’s mordant satire – invoking and channeling a distinguished Russian literary tradition extending back to Gogol – hits home and bites hard.
Set during the week before Trump’s inauguration, Goldberg’s novel unfolds within the Château Sedan Neuve, a crumbling high-rise condominium in Hollywood, Fla., that Melsor calls home. Governed by a corrupt board – rigging bids with contractors doing shoddy work while longtime residents get evicted – it’s a metaphor for America itself.
With Board elections looming, Melsor casts himself as a reformer, downplaying his own corruption by insisting that his opponents are worse; it’s the 2016 election all over again. It’s no accident that Melsor is not only a vocal Trump supporter, but also a close student of Trump’s “The Art of the Deal.”
Bill, a recently cashiered “Washington Post” reporter, reluctantly supports his father as the lesser of two evils.
The ensuing shenanigans demonstrate how far we’ve fallen; while there’s always been corruption and vice, Goldberg suggests that it’s rarely been so brazen.
“People don’t behave like this, flagrantly violating every rule, unless they’re certain the entire game is rigged,” Bill’s girlfriend tells him. “This is flagrant. The cartels behave like this, Putin behaves like this.” And, Bill, reflects, Trump behaves like this, as a “latter-day dimestore version of the dictator” – Stalin – his father “once despised.”
In this morally bankrupt world – where a condominium no longer embodies a community – “nothing is what it seems, everyone has an angle, everyone has a fraud.” Everyone, that is, except Bill.
He drinks too much so he can reflect less on why he’s alone – and on what’s happened to his career and his country. But through much of this novel, Bill clings to his vision of a free press and a free world, in which truth silences fake news. And he still desperately wants to believe that “this 240-year-old democracy is worth fighting for.”
Bill is a male version of Maxine Tarnow, the gumshoe heroine in Pynchon’s “The Bleeding Edge.” While Pynchon’s similarly dark satire of a fallen America has greater breadth and is much more lyrical, “The Château” shares its genre, structure and tone – as well as nostalgia for a younger self and more idealistic era, when so much more seemed possible.
Instead we get Florida, envisioned here as a cesspool of old and increasingly selfish people waiting to die and intent “on stuffing the planet into the coffin with them.” Even when one laughs at their clumsy capers – and you will – some part of you will also want to cry. Even when this book is most puckish, it never ceases to be bleak.
Little wonder that Bill periodically indulges in existential ruminations about whether life is worth living; Goldberg may have left the Soviet Union long ago, but he’s still a soulful Russian at heart.
“He has no assignment, no deadline, no editor – just emptiness,” the narrator tells us, describing how Bill feels. Ostensibly, this passage is about Bill being banished from his beloved newsroom. But it’s really about losing one’s faith in storytelling and hope, during a darkening end time when history plays as farce and the future is just another broken promise.