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Fiction

In Salman Rushdie’s New Novel, the Backdrop Is the Obama Years

Salman Rushdie in New York in 2015.Credit...Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

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THE GOLDEN HOUSE
By Salman Rushdie
380 pp. Random House. $28.99.

According to the publisher, “The Golden House” marks Salman Rushdie’s “return to realism.” An epigraph, however, suggests otherwise: “Give me a copper penny and I’ll tell you a golden story.” And in an early chapter, the narrator notes that a “golden story” in Roman times “was a figure of speech that denoted a tall tale, a wild conceit, something that was obviously untrue.”

The narrator’s description is the more candid. The plot does not fit neatly into any realist box. A mysterious septuagenarian billionaire, Nero Golden, and his three adult sons take up residence in a mansion in downtown New York. They come from “the country that could not be named” (although it is swiftly named as India). As we must expect, given that the patriarch has assumed the name of the last Roman emperor of the Julio-Claudian dynasty, the family’s fall is comprehensive. And, yes, Nero does indeed whip out a violin at the requisite moments. Summarizing the action without including spoilers is tricky, so let’s just say that the body count is high. There are assassinations (four or possibly five), a mass shooting, a suicide and of course there is a fire that leads to more deaths.

This tale is narrated by a 20-something New Yorker, “a would-be writer of films” who views the arrival of the Golden family as “the big project for which I had, with growing desperation, been searching.” He befriends the Goldens with the intention of making a movie about them, being “absolutely clear … that these people were worth spying on.”

The origins of the Goldens remain shrouded “for two entire presidential terms.” Only the narrator (“Call me René,” he tells us in one of the novel’s many literary allusions) and his parents know their true identity: They are (nonpracticing) Muslims from Mumbai who are “fleeing from a terrorist tragedy and a grievous loss,” the death of Mrs. Golden in the Lashkar-e-Taiba attack on the Taj Mahal Palace and Tower Hotel in November 2008. Why this tragedy should have occasioned in Nero a desire for such a complete reinvention of the family identity and an absolute break with the past (“Do not tell them the name of the place we left. Never speak of it,” he instructs his sons) provides the meat of the back story, a mystery that is finally unraveled as the lives of the Golden clan unravel themselves.

It is René, however, who is the novel’s biggest presence. At first he adopts the first-person plural (the collective voice of the local residents, minor characters, he later explains, who “might not make it past the cutting-room floor”) and informs us that he is “by nature self-effacing.” And yet by Page 24, he has overcome his shyness. He is, we learn, the offspring of two Belgian academics: “Do you note, in their son, an inherited note of the professorial?”

René certainly is fond of lecturing — on Greek tragedy, Roman history and literary fiction, among other things — but the “inherited note” is nonetheless difficult to detect. Speaking about the difference between New York and the rest of the United States, René’s father declares, “Iss a bubble, like everyone says now.… Iss like in de Jim Carrey movie, only expanded to big-city size.” René’s mother hands him a folder detailing the Goldens’ past: “In the age of information, my dear … everyone’s garbage is on display for all to see.” Professorial indeed, though it raises the question of why nobody else did a little Googling.

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Credit...Sonny Figueroa/The New York Times

The narrator permits his filmmaker’s imagination to rove freely. After all, he is no mere observer, but an “imagineer,” a co-creator, as it were, of the Goldens’ story. When Nero Golden falls in lust/love with Vasilisa, a beautiful young Russian, René displays an uncharacteristic hesitancy as he ventures into their bedroom scene:

“I rear back and halt myself, ashamed, prufrocked into a sudden pudeur, for, after all, how should I presume? Shall I say, I have known them all, I have seen her like a yellow fog rubbing her back against, rubbing her muzzle upon, shall I say, licking her tongue into the corners of his evening?”

Barely has he set T. S. Eliot spinning in his grave, when he just as suddenly loses his proclaimed pudeur and dives right in. Scenes that could otherwise only be rendered by an omniscient narrator, or by alternating the characters’ perspectives, are punctuated with directions like Cut, Blackout, Wipe, so René can tell us whatever we need to know. Sometimes we are treated to a few pages of film script or monologue (which presumably will form part of the script). When two of the characters take a trip to Mumbai, René wishes he could tag along. “It might be an important part of the story,” he grumbles to his girlfriend, Suchitra. When she tells him to use his imagination, make it up, René professes to be “a little shocked.” In the nick of time, he recalls that this is “a golden story … a wild conceit” and goes right ahead.

All this is good fun, up to a point. But René becomes a tiresome companion. Partly because of his incessant film references (sometimes whole pages of them). Partly because of his addiction to celebrity roll calls: He’s worked with “Jessica Chastain, Keanu Reeves, James Franco, Olivia Wilde”; from Suchitra’s apartment he spies Brad Pitt’s pied-à-terre; he’s told by one of Nero’s sons that he’s “more handsome” than Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt and George Clooney. René demurs, of course. Most tiresomely, he appears unable to think of women as anything other than stereotypes. Vasilisa, in a pair of monologues, is depicted as, ultimately, a scheming whore and a Russian witch, while Suchitra is a “Hindu goddess.”

Naturally, when Vasilisa calls René a “gorgeous boy” and asks him to impregnate her, he finds “the offer of her body overwhelming” and is thrilled to discover “it was her firm conviction that baby-making required extreme excitement.” Suchitra is more practical: “Just get inside me now,” she says, “being the type who came quickly and often.” Oh, the lucky man!

With no apparent sense of irony, René proclaims he is “becoming famous” for his political videos “attacking the Republican insensitivity to women’s issues.”

Nero’s sons — Petronius, Lucius Apuleius and Dionysus, as they have chosen to call themselves (Petya, Apu and D, for short) — are all extraordinary characters. Petya is agoraphobic, “on the autism spectrum” and a “21st-century genius.” Apu is a spiritual seeker and “an exceptionally gifted painter.” D grapples with gender identity issues, which gives rise to the most complex and sensitively imagined scenes in the novel. Collectively, their story lines are high-octane vehicles for observations on everything from art to gun violence, told with Rushdie’s customary brio and narrative panache, and the reader is happy to go along for the ride.

The real weakness, the hollow heart of the novel, is René. The publisher’s description compares “The Golden House” to “The Great Gatsby,” and there’s more than one textual reference to Fitzgerald’s novel. Thus we look to René as a parallel Nick Carraway, to restore, perhaps, a moral compass to the proceedings. René, however, though he claims to be “self aware,” never demonstrates that quality. He ruthlessly exploits his connection with the Goldens, whom he describes as “my passports to my cinematic future.” He commits multiple betrayals. And when those betrayals threaten to undo him, he is only sorry that he did not put himself center stage. “I failed to see that I was the subject.… To be untrue to thyself, youth!, that is the highest treason.” When the Joker-Batwoman (read: Trump-Clinton) presidential election is underway, René and Suchitra make political cartoons that René (with typical modesty) declares “defined the struggle.” The Joker, of course, wins, “his hair green and luminous with triumph, his skin white as a Klansman’s hood, his lips dripping anonymous blood.” Despite (or because of) all the apostrophizing, René fails to demonstrate any insight into why “60-million-plus” brought the Joker to power. He finds it “hard to hold on to that belief in the good to which I dedicated myself.” Although it may appear to the reader that he has mainly dedicated himself to himself. In any case, he is richly (I use the word advisedly) rewarded for his troubles.

Perhaps this is cleverly reflective of “our age of bitterly contested realities,” in which one man’s morality is another man’s evil. It may not be the novel we long for, but it could, just possibly, be the novel we deserve.

Monica Ali is distinguished writer in residence at the University of Surrey. Her most recent novel is “Untold Story.”

A version of this article appears in print on  , Page 14 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: The Midas Touch. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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