Salman Rushdie has become another of my favorite
authors. His detailed and mysterious
characters all have stories too intense, too interesting, and all with splashes
of humor. While he has something of a
reputation as a writer of dense and obscure fiction, his last ten or so novels were
all written with details that leave absolutely nothing left unsaid or
undescribed. His latest novel, The Golden House, maintains his
marvelous and intriguing prose style.
As the dust jacket notes, “On the day of Barack Obama’s
inauguration, an enigmatic billionaire from an [unidentified] foreign shore and
takes up residence in the architectural jewel of ‘the Gardens,’ a cloistered
community in New York’s Greenwich Village.”
Of course, the neighbors are fascinated.
His chosen, new world name is Nero Golden, and his three sons have
adopted names of other Roman figures, Apu—from Lucius Apuleius, Dionysus
prefers, “D,” and Petronius, takes the nickname, Petya. Each of these three men take turns unraveling
the mystery of this family.
Rushdie also weaves lots of references to a whole slew of
literary and real characters ranging from Anton Chekhov to George Clooney. Here is a sample of what is in store for the
intrepid reader. “That night he talked
and drank without stopping, and all of us who were there would carry fragments
of that talk in our memories for the rest of our lives. What crazy, extraordinary talk it was! No limit to the subjects he reached for and
used as punching bags: the British royal family, in particular the lives of
Princess Margaret, who used a Caribbean island as her private boudoir, and
Prince Charles, who wanted to be his lover’s toy; the philosophy of Spinoza (he
liked it); the lyrics of Bob Dylan (he recited the whole of ‘Sad-eyed Lady of
the Lowlands,’ as reverently as if it were a companion piece to ‘La Belle Dame
sans Merci’; the Spassky-Fischer chess match (Fischer had died the year
before); Islamic radicalism (he was against it) and wishy-washy liberalism
(which appeased Islam, he said, so he was against it too); […] the novels of
G.K. Chesterton (he was a fan of The Man
Who was Thursday); the unpleasantness of male chest hair; the ‘unjust
treatment ‘ of Pluto, recently demoted to the status of ‘dwarf planet’ after a
larger body, Eris, was discovered in the Kuiper Belt” (48-49). This is about two-thirds of the list of his
topics.
Nero had some unspecified plans for the future. Rushdie writes, “Nero had hired the most
powerful members of the city’s tribe of publicists, whose most important task
was not to get, but to suppress, publicity; and so what happened in the Golden
House very largely stayed in the Golden House” (52). One son is something of a
loose cannon. Rushdie writes, “D Golden,
when in his brothers’ company, alternated between ingratiation and rage. It was plain that he needed to love and be
loved; there was a tide of emotion in him that needed to wash over people and
he hoped for a returning tide to wash over him. […] Sometimes he seemed wise beyond his years. At other times he behaved like a
four-year-old child” (67).
Salman Rushdie is an amazingly talented writer who can sweep
a reader along on fantastic waves of literature, philosophy, history, and
politics, while never forgetting to smile.
His latest novel, The Golden House
has from me, a solid 5 stars.
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