The Golden House by Salman Rushdie

In Salman Rushdie’s latest novel, Nero Golden, the protagonist, arrives in New York “on the day of Obama’s inauguration in 2009”, said Jerome Boyd Maunsell in the London Evening Standard. An “obscenely wealthy” property developer with a shadowy past in India, Nero takes up residence in Greenwich Village along with his three talented but troubled children, who, like him, have “preposterous” Roman and Greek names – Petronius, Lucius Apuleius and Dionysus. Like F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Jay Gatsby, Nero is soon fuelling “endless rumours” among his neighbours, one of whom – an aspiring film-maker called René – is the novel’s narrator. The Golden House, “essentially” a tragedy, is a novel full of “Dickensian exuberance” – though it falls short of Rushdie’s “best work”.

Rushdie’s portrait of the Golden family is “intelligent and darkly funny”, said Robert Douglas-Fairhurst in The Times. Alas, two-thirds of the way through the novel he introduces a character who comes straight out of a comic book – the green-haired Joker from the Batman stories – and has him decide to “run for president”. This cackling “lord of misrule” is intended to be a caricature of Donald Trump, but the passages featuring him read “less like satire than a howl of despair”, and turn what might have been one of Rushdie’s “finest novels” into a “strangely lopsided work”. On the contrary, said Alex Clark in The Guardian: Rushdie (pictured) has always been an “impish myth-manipulator” who refuses to accept that the “lives of the emperors can’t be blended with film noir, popular culture and crime caper”. With this “complex and witty fable”, he once again proves that they can.