The Golden House

Reviews

It’s one of the most vivid and convincing portraits of contemporary America I’ve read. [A] complex and witty fable … Rushdie has always been an impish myth-manipulator, refusing to accept, as in this novel, that the lives of the emperors can’t be blended with film noir, popular culture and crime caper. On the evidence of The Golden House, he is quite right. Unruly but exuberant… Much of the success of The Golden House, in fact, lies in its humour and in the vigour of its storytelling… There is a glowing energy to the prose that makes this Rushdie’s most enjoyable, mischievous and American of novels. Intelligent and darkly funny...with a raw political edge. Rushdie writes with a Dickensian exuberance, always full of humour as well as striking scornful, tragic notes. Often he plays the role of satirist. His caricatures and outsize figures are full of life, wickedness and human energy: again, as in Dickens, grounded in a precise social and political scene. Rushdie’s fable is a sprightly portrait of American life from Obama’s election to the rise of Trump. Where Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities sent up the go-go, me-me Reagan/Bush era, Rushdie’s latest novel captures the existential uncertainties of the anxious Obama years... A sort of Great Gatsby for our time: everyone is implicated, no one is innocent, and no one comes out unscathed. A ravishingly well-told, deeply knowledgeable, magnificently insightful, and righteously outraged epic which pos­es timeless questions about the human condition... As Rushdie’s blazing tale surges toward its crescendo, life, as it always has, rises stubbornly from the ashes, as does love. Salman Rushdie is a writer of illimitable imagination and verbal ingenuity. He grips us with wild storylines, takes us on flights of fancy, brings us back down again, enthralled and dazed… The terrorist attacks by Islamicists, the unplanned developments, the bribery and corruption and multiple tragedies are gritty, real and moving. Extreme scenes are written so beautifully I don’t think I will ever forget them… The Golden House is an extraordinary book, a brooding meditation on the personal and political, on ethics, egotism, freedom and interdependence. This is a compelling thriller with a pinch of fantasy, populated by larger-than-life characters… This powerfully cinematic novel, enriched by references to literature, popular culture and film, is dense, detailed and rewarding, displaying one of our leading novelists at the top of his game. Expand reviews