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A review by melaninny
The Golden House by Salman Rushdie
3.0
This book is The Great Gatsby of our time.
That is neither a compliment or a complaint, it's just the conclusion I came to about halfway through (in fact, from me it is more of a condemnation, as any glance at my rating of The Great Gatsby will reveal). The parallels between the two finally clicked into place. In Nick, we had our generic outside-looking-in narrator, and in René we have a very similar man; a neighbor obsessed with the affairs of the rich, shady family who moved in next door, living vicariously through them and wishing he was them, until he becomes them.
It is, also, a tragedy.
The Golden House’s strengths lie in its social commentary. The novel crawls into all the insecurities of our age, the flaws and the thought wars of the past ten years, and savagely exposes them. There are long rants, in Rushdie’s sometimes frustrating, sometimes sublime run-on sentences. There are page-long critiques of Trump, there are paragraphs of other characters worried about the state of political correctness, and long ruminations about identity and the self. It crams references in as if Rushdie felt like this would be his only opportunity to expose all he knows, so he created an almost impossibly intellectual character to explore his narrative in order to cram in as many rants as would alleviate the stress of being a writer in our time. It was somehow satisfying, seeing these anxieties written in such a prolific way.
The novel’s faults lie in its plot, at once contrived and too-tragic, maudlin and unbelievable. The story is mired in foreshadowing and cliche. The story, itself, is probably commentary on something, but gosh did I want some emotional core to hang on to, and I never quite found it, and I’m not sure it was given. Like in Gatsby, I was expected to feel sympathy for the plights of the supercorruptandrich, only unlike in Gatsby, the narrator was impossibly intolerable, and the end left me feeling empty. Characters are gotten rid of in the exact order you become attached to them--by the end you are left with almost no one, except for the tertiary but poised female characters who occupied the background, and who, frankly, deserved better than they got.
Don’t get me wrong, this is a gorgeously and innovatively written book that could easily become a symbol of our age, in much the same way The Great Gatsby encapsulates the Jazz age. But that doesn’t make it a treat to read, and the more I think about it, the more exhausted I become.
That is neither a compliment or a complaint, it's just the conclusion I came to about halfway through (in fact, from me it is more of a condemnation, as any glance at my rating of The Great Gatsby will reveal). The parallels between the two finally clicked into place. In Nick, we had our generic outside-looking-in narrator, and in René we have a very similar man; a neighbor obsessed with the affairs of the rich, shady family who moved in next door, living vicariously through them and wishing he was them, until he becomes them.
It is, also, a tragedy.
The Golden House’s strengths lie in its social commentary. The novel crawls into all the insecurities of our age, the flaws and the thought wars of the past ten years, and savagely exposes them. There are long rants, in Rushdie’s sometimes frustrating, sometimes sublime run-on sentences. There are page-long critiques of Trump, there are paragraphs of other characters worried about the state of political correctness, and long ruminations about identity and the self. It crams references in as if Rushdie felt like this would be his only opportunity to expose all he knows, so he created an almost impossibly intellectual character to explore his narrative in order to cram in as many rants as would alleviate the stress of being a writer in our time. It was somehow satisfying, seeing these anxieties written in such a prolific way.
The novel’s faults lie in its plot, at once contrived and too-tragic, maudlin and unbelievable. The story is mired in foreshadowing and cliche. The story, itself, is probably commentary on something, but gosh did I want some emotional core to hang on to, and I never quite found it, and I’m not sure it was given. Like in Gatsby, I was expected to feel sympathy for the plights of the supercorruptandrich, only unlike in Gatsby, the narrator was impossibly intolerable, and the end left me feeling empty. Characters are gotten rid of in the exact order you become attached to them--by the end you are left with almost no one, except for the tertiary but poised female characters who occupied the background, and who, frankly, deserved better than they got.
Don’t get me wrong, this is a gorgeously and innovatively written book that could easily become a symbol of our age, in much the same way The Great Gatsby encapsulates the Jazz age. But that doesn’t make it a treat to read, and the more I think about it, the more exhausted I become.