I’m old enough to have been reading Salman Rushdie before the fatwa started, so we’ve got a long history together.
One of my daughter’s favourite books, that we’ve read aloud together multiple times, is Rushdie’s Haroun and the Sea of Stories, a book that I can’t compliment highly enough. Not many books have received a unanimous thumbs up at the Beer & Books Club, but Haroun was one of them.
In grad school, September 1994, I showed up to the first day of our course on postmodernism thinking that we had only one text, namely Fredric Jameson’s magisterial Postmodernism; or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, because it was the only title listed at the bookstore. Much to everyone’s surprise, our professor explained that this was a course on Salman Rushdie, but that he hadn’t been allowed to offer such a course publicly. In the end, it was a course on what I’d only later hear described as decolonization, focused on Rushdie’s and Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s aesthetic and narrative practices: inspiring, challenging, and community-minded, two decades on I continue to think about the lessons of that course and those texts.
Not every Rushdie novel has thrilled me, in the way that I felt about Fury, about The Satanic Verses, and Midnight’s Children. I enjoyed The Enchantress of Florence well enough, but I failed a couple of times to stick with Don Quichotte. These things happen, in long relations between reader and writer, and it’s fine.
None of that, though, prepared me for how I’d feel about The Golden House, Rushdie’s 2017 novel set during the Trump/Obama years. The novel’s not about Trump or Obama, though, but about a father and three grown sons who arrive in a special, unique, small neighbourhood within New York City, calling themselves the Goldens and each having the name of a Roman emperor.
The narrator and main character is a young film-maker who grew up in the neighbourhood, who develops an obsession with the Goldens that becomes a desire to make a film about them. To some extent, therefore, we’re seeing all the raw background material out of which René Unterlinden wants to create his masterpiece, but through the (dare I say it) lens through which he comes to reimagine them. It’s a Rushdie novel, so one isn’t surprised when the powerful decay, but it’s a remarkable portrait of how the various paths that such decay can take.
The Occupy movement comes up, naturally, and is more or less lampooned. The art scene makes a lengthy appearance, including its efforts to foreground more marginalized voices, all of which comes in for some indelicate (and perhaps ungenerous) prodding. Politics is an absurdity; film and social media and activism, especially in relation to politics, get bashed. Most of all, the thorny and complicated 2020s questions of gender get … well, it’s complicated.
First, here’s a characteristically thoughtful interview where Rushdie discusses (among many other things) his experiences with and learning about transgender individuals and communities. It’s a novel, and it’s only depicting a single person’s (a single character’s) lived reality. Rushdie has done remarkable work in past novels, trying to get inside the lives and minds of characters very different from each other, and I think that’s how best to understand the trans issues in The Golden House as well.
But of course it’s hard to discuss such things, so Rushdie came in for a certain amount of pushback for how the novel handles gender identity in general, and trans issues specifically.
Rushdie’s enormous abilities mean that his fictions and characters can seem larger than life, and indeed they are. But a novelist doesn’t get to write Goldberg variations, 30 versions of a story, not when the novels are gigantic, overstuffed, hyperreal creations like Rushdie’s, so there’s extra pressure on individual characters and the authorial decisions behind them.
And I admit, I found Rushdie’s depiction of gender identity in this novel distracting, and kind of regrettable. It’s an available variation, certainly, and he’s the artist in this relationship, but as a reader, I wish he’d chosen differently.