Salman Rushdie’s 13th novel, “The Golden House,” asks all the right questions about our current identity politics fiasco. The novel asks: Can we stop being who we were and take on a new identity? Can a person who has done bad things ever be a good person? What are the politics of believing that identity is a choice?
“The Golden House” is chockablock with literary, mythological and pop cultural references. There are parallels with “The Great Gatsby,” “Bonfire of the Vanities,” Alfred Hitchcock’s “Rear Window,” the Russian “Baba Yaga” fairytale and “Batman,” with a Trumpian Joker.
It’s a dizzying, sometimes brilliant and profound, but ultimately confusing, read.
In “The Golden House,” a wealthy elderly man and his three grown sons immigrate to America and take up residence in a Greenwich Village mansion. The father christens himself Nero Julius Golden, after the last of the Julio-Claudian monarchs who fiddled while Rome burned. Nero tells his sons to “screw the identity parade. Tell them, we are snakes who shed our skin,” because in America, you can become somebody new.
Nero’s past is sordid. He was a real estate magnate in Mumbai, India and a money launderer for the mob. After his wife is killed in the 2008 terrorist attacks in Mumbai, he moves to America in an attempt to leave his past behind. His second wife is a young Russian woman who is clearly out for his money.
The comparison to Donald and Melania is all too obvious, and feels like an afterthought. I don’t know this for sure, but I suspect that Mr. Rushdie couldn’t help but insert the political rise of Donald Trump, which must have occurred contemporaneous to the writing of this novel.
Mr. Rushdie is known for magical realism, the yoking of the real with the fantastic, often with a heavy dose of nationalist and religious politics, most notably in “The Satanic Verses” and “Midnight’s Children.” This technique resulted in calls for his assassination in the former, and one of the highest literary accolades, the “Best of the Bookers” award, in the latter.
“The Golden House,” is not straightforward realism. Renee Unterlinden, aspiring filmmaker, is the narrator. Renee spends time with the newly christened Goldens and observes them from the shadows, filling in the gaps of his knowledge with his imagination. At times, the novel becomes a screenplay as Rene imagines how the Golden family story will transform into film.
Each chapter in “The Golden House” focuses on the viewpoint of a single character in the Golden family. The most compelling of these character studies is Nero’s son Dionysus, known simply as D., who is pressured to become a male to female transgender person.
D. puts forth the most controversial idea regarding identity politics: “What if . . . homosexuality was inborn, that it was a human way to be, it couldn’t be chosen or unchosen, and what if I hated the reactionary idea that you could reeducate a gay person to make a different choice and give up his gayness. What if I can’t see how . . .. these multiple-possibility gender nuances are not part of that same reactionary ideology. What if . . . my identity is just difficult, and painful, and confusing, and I don’t know how to choose or what to choose or even if choosing is what has to happen?”
“The Golden House” is, not surprisingly, a tragedy. A snake can’t shed his skin and become something else. Identity is not mutable, a capricious thing you can just change as you like. The novel’s solution: Just love people for who they are.
This sentiment, however warm and fuzzy, feels naïve. Despite its moments of insight and Trumpian allusions, “The Golden House” never coheres enough to make a statement beyond this: The Left, with its reactionary identity politics and simplistic solutions to complex problems, is screwed.
Julie Hakim Azzam teaches in the English Department at Pitt and works at the School of Art at Carnegie Mellon University. (Twitter: @JulieAzzam)
First Published: October 15, 2017, 11:00 a.m.
