It's difficult to not like a Salman Rushdie book. The turns of phrase, the colorful language, a complex understanding of human nature. It's all there. And yet, there is just something about The Golden House that feels very off. Very different from what one has come to expect in a Salman Rushdie novel.

This is a contemporary novel. It feels like it has been constantly updated, reacting to the news cycle even as it was going into print. This seemed somewhat unusual to me, perhaps because I have been used to Rushdie's more abstract, magical realism based work set in distant times.

As far as contemporary considerations go, there is plenty of name dropping. It seems like Rushdie was sitting with a list of contemporary references close at hand, ready to be plugged into the narrative wherever possible. And this is subject matter that Rushdie is clearly uncomfortable and unfamiliar with.

For instance, when he clumsily shoehorns in a reference to the Gamergate controversy, it is with the grace of a dolphin driving a stick shift. That is to say, highly distracting and entirely ineffective. Rushdie is clearly more adept at swimming through the muddied depths of the human psyche, and of course he continues to do that well.

At the end of the day, I don't know how much of this book will remain with me. I did not quite care for the characters who seemed mostly unlikable and interesting only in a generic way. Autism, gender fluidity, amorality, these are all fascinating ideas in their own right, but they don't necessarily make for fascinating characters.

I guess there was a larger point being made about the slow unraveling of our times and our collective impending doom, but there's already so much of that everywhere, that I guess at some point one becomes numb to it.

Yes, the world as we know it does not make sense anymore. We are in a time of rapid decline, and staring once more at horrors we thought we had left behind. I just didn't want to read about them for a change.