Salman Rushdie’s new novel, The Golden House, tells the story of a wealthy family from Mumbai desperately seeking to forget the tragedy of 26/11 as they try to reinvent themselves in New York City.
‘The Goldens have fetched up in Greenwich Village just as Barack Obama is taking the reins of presidency, and the novel runs until his successor – here presented simply as the Joker, or a “giant victorious green-haired cartoon king and his billion-dollar movie franchise” – takes over; America’s descent into grand guignol functions as a shadow story to the Goldens, sometimes more and sometimes less frightening and uncontrolled’, as The Guardian describes it. The New York Times lambasts it saying, ‘…Each sentence in it is a Cirque du Soleil into a net that only he can see… Each sentence seems to be composed of star dust, pixie dust, fairy dust…fried and refried…’
Time magazine says, Salman Rushdie Plays the Trump Card. ‘The Joker screams and careens around the city in the background of the novel, wreaking havoc while the main characters deal with their daily lives. … in a way what I was trying to say was here’s a real world, with real people facing their real world problems, and meanwhile, the public sphere has become this grotesque’, Rushdie defends himself.