Salman Rushdie's 'The Golden House' stretches much beyond what story merits

The literary insult Rushdie delivers on Trump, however, is more elaborate and pinching in that he doesn't even name the bombastic US president

There is some distant relationship between F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and Salman Rushdie’s thirteenth novel: Both are about great power and money, about the crumbling American dream, and about a great fall and death. Both are narrated by outsiders: René Unterlinden, a millennial New Yorker, might as well have been a few generations removed from Nick Carraway. But the relationship ends there. The most evident sign of this divergence is number of the pages in both novels. Fitzgerald’s masterpiece about the Jazz Age barely makes it to 250 pages in even the most generously published edition; Rushdie’s latest offering struggles on for nearly 400 pages.

At the centre of this family and social and political saga is Nero Golden. Though Rushdie has denied that the character is based on US President Donald Trump, the references are too stark, too un-artistic, to miss the eye even of a casual reader. Like Trump, Nero is fabulously wealthy, having acquired his billions from real estate, and finds himself a stunning Russian wife. Rushdie is no stranger to poking at powerful, bombastic men, it once earned him a murderous fatwa. The literary insult he delivers on Trump, however, is more elaborate — and pinching — in that he doesn’t even name the bombastic US president.

This is, however, all that one might say of the book — favourable or unfavourable. While writing Midnight’s Children, the book that pitchforked him into the centre of world literature, Rushdie discovered the process of chutneyfying the language in which canonical English novels were written. This gave his best books — The Satanic Verses, Haroun and the Sea of Stories — a kind of unprecedented vitality. Understandably, Unterlinden, a documentary filmmaker and the son of Belgian academics, a mix of Poirot and Tintin, cannot talk in the same tongue as Saleem Sinai. At the same time, his voice lacks any distinctive feature: is this Rushdie’s attempt to poke fun at the millennials or a failed attempt by him to capture the authentic voice of an artistic twenty-something New Yorker? One will never know, like so many other things in this book.

The narrative style is, in fact, so soporific that pretty early in the book I started making a list of references Rushdie makes on the endpapers. The first ones were obvious: Nero, the lyre-playing Caesar who couldn’t distract himself from epicurean delights even as Rome burned all around him. But like Nero Golden, his three sons also have Latin names: Petronius, Lucius Apuleis and Dionysius. But they also have pet names: Petya (ref. Chekhov), Apu (ref. Satyajit Ray) and D. They arrive in New York after a tragedy back home, in an unknown city, which is gradually revealed as Bombay (Mumbai). Of course, they are migrants, even refugees, and are escaping violence or its aftermath — in this case the 26/11 terror attack; like refugees, they try to reinvent themselves in their new home. This is a strange — some might even say bizarre — reversal of the central image of our times: refugees, from Syria, Rakhine or anywhere else.

NEW YORK STATE OF MIND: The narrative links the city with Mumbai during the terror attack. (Photo: Reuters)

To what purpose, you might ask in a frustrated moment. And, never find the answer or, worse still, get lost in the minefield of references that are injected into the narrative for no better reason than perhaps Rushdie’s sudden fancy for it. The list I made includes: Greek and Roman history, German and Bollywood films, Prufrock, video games, New York history, Bombay history, gender theory, anti-smuggling laws... At one point, the narrator howls: “The best had lost all conviction, and the worst were filled with passionate intensity and the weakness of the just was revealed by the wrath of the unjust.” This reference is probably intended to be poignant, cathartic.

The Golden House

Author: Salman Rushdie
Publisher: Penguin
Pages: 400
Price: Rs 517

Unfortunately, it falls flat and sounds trite.

Then again, is it really trite? Is it really lazy writing? Or has Rushdie mastered a new technique, a new voice, perfectly representing that of a New Yorker stuck in neo-liberal clichés, as Unterlinden definitely is? One might never know, like so many other things in this book. This reader decided it was definitely the former, especially because the pace of the narrative is deliberately slow and self-indulgent. Why would I continue reading once I find out Nero Golden’s disastrous secret — having struggled to even reach that point in the narrative?

There are too many good books in the world, and too little time to read, especially for a millennial like me, suffering from acute attention deficit.

Towards the end, there are some good passages about the Mumbai terror attack, and how it touches everyone’s lives in the novel. But, it is too little and too late, and anyhow, what their significance is can also be added to the long list of things we shall never know. 

The Golden House, unlike its name and the gilded characters it shows us, lacks the golden touchRushdie once displayed.