BOOKS, ARTS & MANNERS46 | http://www.nationalreview.com OCTOBER 30 , 2017accident, to the illustrious Goldens—but
it doesn’t excuse the way René sounds.
One detects not a note of the professorial
but a novelist whose gifts of ventrilo-
quism are lacking, a novelist who can
only sound like himself.
Of the Golden house, René tells us
that it “always felt to us like a sort of
beautiful fake. We murmured to one
another some words of Primo Levi’s:
‘This is the most immediate fruit of
exile, of uprooting: the prevalence of the
unreal over the real.’” To imagine one
character portentously “murmuring” a
verbatim Primo Levi quotation is diffi-
cult enough; to imagine a chorus of
neighbors doing so should produce
snorts of derision. There is an awful lot
of this stuff on offer. The book is a
thicket of quotations, allusions, and
name-drops, at times more of a curricu-
lum or a crossword puzzle than a genuine-
ly organic narrative. Perhaps Rushdie
intended The Golden Houseas a paean
to the arts and to storytelling. What has
sprung from his head is, unfortunately,
an interminable boast.
The novel’s most memorable attempt
to deviate from this program under-scores the problem. Here René imagines
the car accident that took his parents’
lives and that grants his character
something of a tragic dimension. His
professorial parents are listening to an
audio book of Homer, of course, which
allows René to wax rhapsodic about
Helen “reaching up and caressing the
wooden belly of the [Trojan horse] erot-
ically as she spoke.” Then Rushdie
switches his register:Yes, maybe that immortal moment rang
in their ears, when the metal pipe lying in
the road just lying there metal f***ing
pipe fell off some f***ing truck did the
truck driver stop no he didn’t did he even
know no he probably didn’t did he
secure his load properly no he absolutely
f***ing didn’t because there in the road
the metal pipe
in the HOV lane because these were my
parents my beloved my only and they
weren’t speedsters no sir they preferred to
trundle along safely in the no entry no exitmultiple occupancy sensible road use lane
marked with a diamond because why who
cares why but on this occasion not so
f***ing safe because the metal pipe
rollingEtc. This abrupt shift to what sounds
like slam poetry feels sincere neither on
Rushdie’s part nor on René’s. This is
doubly the case because both the novelist
and the filmmaker are so preoccupied
with artifice. There is no place in a novel
so eager to be a well-wrought urn for
this kind of fragmented, furious lan-
guage. It is a reminder of how, as in
some Nabokov, a surfeit of cleverness
can lead to emotional sterility just at the
moment when real feeling is needed
most. In too much of The Golden House
the characters are puzzle pieces, and
puzzle pieces are usually cardboard.
That is why, in the end, the book both
works and doesn’t work as a comment
on the other larger-than-life but smaller-
than-life character who looms over it:
Donald Trump. The ascendancy of
Trump—herein, with high-school-
newspaper subtlety, referred to only as
“The Joker”—is described in parallelwith Nero Golden’s rise and fall. But the
“Trump era,” as people were fond of
calling it before it had even begun, is not
defined in the popular imagination, as
the 1980s were, primarily by widespread
rapine. The two men have nothing but
money in common: They are boring in
different ways, Trump in his ignorance
and Golden in his educated but somehow
content-free pomposity. Their ambitions
tell us nothing about our own.
So what? The Golden Housedeals not
with titans but with men and women
whose money can’t hide the fact that they
take themselves far too seriously. Their
spectacular and even pyrotechnic
downfalls—the last writer who could get
away with so many “everyone got run
over by a truck” climaxes died in 1616—
are underwhelming because they happen
to grotesques and not to people. The rich,
Rushdie seems to tell us, are different
from you and me—utterly and com-
pletely insufferable.We also learn that The Golden House will
end in a “large—and, metaphorically
speaking, apocalyptic”—fire, and that
Rushdie has never heard of a spoiler alert.
Nero has fled his home city, Mumbai,
in the wake of his wife’s death in the
November 2008 terrorist attacks there.
Like a king in a fairy tale, as Rushdie
reminds us, or a Mafia don, as the book’s
heavy debt to The Godfatherreminds us,
Nero has three sons, Petronius, Apuleius,
and Dionysus—or Petya, Apu (which
bathetically recalls not the author of The
Golden Assbut the convenience-store
owner from The Simpsons), and D. Their
names, too, are assumed, but their iden-
tities are very much their own. It is their
love affairs, betrayals, breakdowns, and
transformations that make up The
Golden House’s most successful and
affecting material.
The least successful of these sub-
narratives, treating D’s gender confu-
sion, feels as if it has been snatched from
recent headlines and pressed into the
service of the novel’s heaviest-handed
mythological overtones.
Even less imaginative, and frankly not
especially affecting, is the role of Vasilisa,a central-casting femme fatale who is dia-
bolically bent on giving birth to a Golden
child and heir. (Vasilisa is both a Greek
name meaning “queen” and a character
from Russian folklore; alas, in context, it
just sounds like a blue-movie portman-
teau of Vaseline and Lisa.) The manner in
which she betrays her fabulously wealthy
husband, with the assistance of our narra-
tor, René, is in keeping with the demands
of tragedy but out of step with anything
the reader has learned about René’s book-
ish, morally anxious temperament. This
may be the book’s fatal flaw.
No, the truly fatal flaw of The Golden
House is René’s narrative voice. “Both
my parents,” he tells the reader, “were
college professors (do you note, in their
son, an inherited note of the professorial?)
who bought our house near the corner of
Sullivan and Houston back in the Jurassic
era when things were cheap.” This back-
story explains the proximity of René, who
has been orphaned by his parents’ carThe Golden House deals not with titans but with men and
women whose money can’t hide the fact that
they take themselves far too seriously.
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