Reading The Golden House is like buying a pack of cookies that are tagged “We apologise, but these are accidentally over-baked” and then sitting with your cup of tea and biting reluctantly but knowingly into one overdone confection after another- all tasting exactly like the cookies you love but none containing that necessary texture: that treasured semi-done soiled softness at the center. My point being, even when our author is seen confessing to the literary conceits employed by him via his narrator, this knowledge doesn’t minimise the damage done by the said conceits to the story’s core: its heart, especially if your reader feels uncertain about the mind-games you are playing to tell a basic story.

I am that reader who continuously felt uncertain about the eventual aims of this hyperbolic, over-amped, over-scored third person Peeping Tom narrative that sees a young New York film-maker René chronicle the life and times of his super-rich immigrant neighbours: The Goldens. With Roman names (which is a recurring cue to pontificate on metamorphoses and immigration), this millionaire-from-abroad with the atmosphere and entourage of oligarchs and media moghuls dominating the political scene today, comes in tow with three sons, buys prime property in the heart of NYC and is seen dabbling in high society almost immediately, which has our Nick Carraway-like narrator deeply curious and suspicious of this Gatsby-like Eastern oligarch.

“The Golden House” slowly gets revealed to be a two-pronged book: a surreal confessional where The Goldens get chronicled from very close quarters by René who gets to befriend the father, the three sons (one with Asperger’s, one with gender identity issues and one an avant-garde artist) and later finding himself deeply implicated in their life courtesy the father’s Russian mistress Vasilisa. He is seen embellishing his private equation and the familial bonds with the echoes, bends and monikers of the greatest of Greek tragedies. It also, every now and then morphs into a re-imagined screenplay where the Goldens’ rise and fall is given a choreographed sweep of an “Operatic-Realist” Tone, something the Scorcese or Tarantino of 90s might have helmed, and our young, informed film-maker gets an excuse to invoke the best of World Cinema to frame this family next door.

Already bulked with two missions of friendship and biopic-in-the-making with the complications of entanglement between film-maker/author and subject, Rushdie also wants his characters and us to worry (and also scoff at, because we are so intelligent!) at the contemporary state of world affairs and two giant intellectual debates around Metamorphosis and Identity, which get shoehorned with secondary characters and unasked-for digressions about the narrator’s girlfriend (employed in the Museum of Identity) employment and one Golden Son neuroticising the contemporary hypocrisy and obsession with Defining ourselves.

I was, I confess, at first overjoyed to be confronted with all these thematic and storied elements. Seeped in Rushdie’s often unstoppable loquacity, frenzied passages and pages running amok with either free association from Greek mythology to reality TV or unbridled anger or side-splitting, no-fools-suffered societal satire, he showed his trademark ability to trance his reader into a delirious state of all-encompassing understanding and hilarious cluelessness emanating from the sheer sensory overload, from the opacity and indifference of Others that surrounds and invades his characters’ psyches, which is not that far from the world and its storied counterpart in televised/facebooked/filmed narratives surrounding us. But seeing it transcribed thus is like having four televisions on at full volume in the same room for a week on end-two of them with your favourite panellists discussing intensely about issues you deeply care about and the other two playing scenes from your favourite films interrupted by the newsreel showing the latest terrorist attacks and hurricanes, while trying to have a conversation with a friend talking about his weird neighbours and scrolling through your twitter feed on the computer on the opinion pieces from your favourite columnists. All at once. For a whole week. It is, eventually exhausting.

There is too much pull in all these individual elements, and I fear with the central narrative hidden by the film-making obsession and a semi-convincing, derivative screenplay, and all the bombastic super-constructions and digressions into dialectics and film-making, the basic humanity of the book’s characters becomes undermined. The longer the book went on, the more I found myself getting exasperated at the Commenting on the Upside Down World and almost disbelieving that the Goldens ever existed or that Rene’s screenplay is for real. There’d be a scene of dialogue or scene which would bring in some texture, but it’ll be swept by René and his screenplay-ing of it all.

It is curious that in the eventual scheme of things, the Goldens don’t end up being caricatured as the Moneyed, Intellectually impoverished Immigrants and it is the intellectual narrator who comes up looking pathetic in not just being brazen enough in purloining a deeply tragic time of the Goldens for his screenplay, but also trying to make his readers invested in him salivating at the prospect of bringing to the screen key tragic moments of the family again and again.

Unfortunately, René is who we are stuck with and his intellectual reframing is almost sociopathic as the Goldens leap from one tragedy to another. His elevation and fabrication of the Goldens past and present eventually seems more to service his screenplay than to respect his friendship or the Goldens’ humanity, just as his implication within the family affairs that he so artfully manufactures with Greco-Roman curlicues comes across as him servicing solely his ego (he seems convinced with his super-constructions that he is the helpless, manipulated party when he is by turns manipulative, voyeuristic and exploitative).

The emotional responses of René the person to the family’s tragedies, despite given the expository skills of Rushdie the intellectual, is conspicuous by their absence. Its this emotional vacuity at the center that, despite his agency in parsing the world around us correctly, I struggled with the novel at the project’s center, and after a point stopped caring for René’s version of Goldens and the world. It is interesting that despite being an intellectual, Rushdie chooses a narrator from the literati who is repulsed and entranced in equal measure by the glitterati. The unconvincing, deeply-referenced, derivative screenplay also made me wonder if this continuous thread was driven by Rushdie’s unending love for the medium of film as the final product and a parallel disillusionment with the process of film-making and the various collaborations, liberties and tone required to make a film.

Beyond the intentional or unintentional tonal misfires, there are great too many passages resplendent with irony, shrewd satire, oh-so-clever juxtapositions, canny and playful dissection of contemporary society, world politics and culture for me to dismiss the Golden House. It might not come together as a novel, but its prolixity can be ingested in small bites, if only to revel at Rushdie's ability to make connections in an increasingly disconnected (yet illusorily connected) world.