The Golden House: A Novel

Reading Salman Rushdie's latest novel was a fascinating experience for me. I won't offer a summary, since that has already been done so well by so many.

I found the characters and the subplots engrossing and the writing brilliant and engaging. The vocabulary excited me. Yes, really, especially the word DOTARD--I mean, did Kim Jong-un's translator read this? And it's not often that an author uses the term "eschatology." (Salman Rushdie and David Foster Wallace are my only experiences.)

The pop culture and literary references are intriguing fun, and made me feel that I belonged within these pages. And at times, Rushdie is incredibly prescient.

The Golden House is ripe for discussion, for there are some mysteries left in the end. It is Nero Golden whose history forms the backbone of this tome, and he is a complex personality. Rushdie seems to challenge us readers to question what parts of him are good, which bad. How responsible is he for all that happens to his family? Golden's complexity is a contrast to The Joker, a character who enters the political arena and casts a purely dark, evil background to the story. And yes, everyone who reads this novel will know exactly who The Joker is. Rushdie is sure to offend some, but we know he's not afraid of that.

Bravo! This is a masterpiece.

I received an advance review copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for my honest review. While this book is a bit of a tangled mess of melodrama, that was part of its charm. Shamelessly gothic enough to remind me of my childhood love of Dark Shadows, with a huge homage to Greco-Roman and Shakespearean tragedies. The narrative device of having a fledgling filmmaker who wants to do a documentary on the neighbors really worked well. It helped to tie the numerous flashbacks and side plots together through the narrator's discovery process.

The Golden House is a word nerd's treasure trove. When the narrative trickery isn't quite enough to make sense of all of the random craziness, I still found myself reveling in the beauty of the sentences. There is plenty of satire to go around, landing particularly hard on New York real estate magnates, mob bosses, and politicians. It takes a bit of plodding to find all the hidden gems, and it's worth the effort.