The first chapter of Salman Rushdie’s The Golden House ends on a cliff-hanger, one of those sentences designed to make you want to read more. “How wrong we were,” it reads. And despite the rambling nature of that first chapter, which read like an urgent, crazed speech and had me re-reading sentences several times to understand them, the cliff-hanger worked. I wanted to read more.
But by the fourth of these cliff-hanger sentences, which was how every chapter seemed to end, I had changed my mind. To take a page from Rushdie’s book, how wrong I was.
There are things I like about The Golden House. But these are small things, which must be balanced, and they felt drowned out with the way the book was written. The things I liked could not redeem the overwhelming difficulty I had reading this book.
Simply put, I liked the story. The mysterious Golden family beginning anew in America, the slimy and secretive Nero Golden and his three sons, shrouded with doubt and painted as caricatures, set at the dawn of the Obama-era but somehow also in a completely different world–this is the type of story I am drawn to. I loved the romantic allusions to Roman emperors, the literary comparisons and the unnatural way that every character seemed to have memorized the entirety of classical mythology. Though the narrator keeps referencing present or recent political events, shadowing the Obama-era and ending with an election whose top contender, “The Joker,” hits a little too close to home, the book feels set in another time or reality. All the allusions make the impending implosion of the Goldens, constantly referred to as the narrator wove the story, seem that much more grand, like it was Caesar himself who would fall from grace.
It was the writing, however, that made this book so hard to get through. I tried to immerse myself in the character of the narrator, who begins by using “we” as if the whole community is telling the story before introducing himself – and then rambling on about himself – in the fourth chapter. At first, I was relieved, having felt alienated by the “we.” But the narrator (or protagonist, as he sometimes seems to portray himself as) I found René Unterlinden insufferable. As a person, he feels too outward, too constructed. I liked the characterization of the Golden family, and it made sense, especially since the narrator himself describes his storytelling as “operatic realism.” But when he becomes part of that contrived, embellished staging, the story loses its appeal.
René attaches himself to the Golden family, setting his sights on them as the subjects of a film. He is fascinated with their story, or lack thereof, and is constantly filling in the gaps in the Goldens’ backgrounds with imagined tidbits and a heavy dose of literary allusions. Rushdie’s descriptions of people, buildings, and human nature are often striking and ringing of real-world truth, but his wordiness tends to drown out the more delicately beautiful images he is trying to capture. I found myself wondering how much of the narrator was Rushdie himself – I often felt like I was peeking into the cluttered mind of an author who, on his 13th novel, wants to stuff it with all the grand ideas left over from his previous books. By the third chapter, I was longing for some dialogue.
This style is not new to Rushdie, nor will it be new to his readers. Perhaps closer followers of his work won’t have trouble with it the way I do. But I think this complicated, allusion-ridden way of writing has been done before with more clarity, so that it adds to the reader’s immersion but doesn’t detract from their enjoyment of the book. I think of the opening pages of Rushdie’s book Midnight’s Children, which describes the prophesied birth in a similar manner to what I think he is trying to achieve in the beginning of The Golden House – the reader is meant to be immediately pulled into the story by the urgency and personal tone of the narrator. But in The Golden House, Rushdie doesn’t know where to stop.
