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A review by gilmoreguide
The Golden House by Salman Rushdie
3.0
I’m a fan of detail in my fiction. I love it whether it’s literary (Donna Tartt) or historical (Alison Weir, Ken Follett), but when it isn’t specific to the story and is in fact an extrapolation of some minor concept, it can be exhausting. This means I left Salman Rushdie’s The Golden House feeling that the book was 800 pages long when it was actually only 380. Why? Because Rushdie has a brilliant mind so crammed with dazzling thoughts that they can sometimes take over the page. Which isn’t to say that those thoughts are unnecessary, because they’re not, but while current events provide the backdrop for the novel, they often take over center stage.
There is a story in The Golden House and it’s a doozy. In 2009 Nero Golden (not his original name) comes to America with a lot of money and three unusual sons. Petya, the oldest, is somewhere on the autism spectrum and agoraphobic. Apu thinks of himself as an artist and wants to live accordingly (but still on Daddy’s dime). Dionysus (D) is gender conflicted. Beyond those details everything about them is a mystery: their real names, where they come from, and where they got their money. They move into a mansion in an exclusive neighborhood in Manhattan and soon become an object of fascination for René, a young man with dreams of becoming a filmmaker who lives in the neighborhood. He decides the family, with all its secrets, would be the perfect subject for a documentary, but the closer he gets to them the more tangled his life becomes with theirs. By the time The Golden House ends nothing will be as it began.
The rest of this review is at The Gilmore Guide to Books: http://wp.me/p2B7gG-2qd
There is a story in The Golden House and it’s a doozy. In 2009 Nero Golden (not his original name) comes to America with a lot of money and three unusual sons. Petya, the oldest, is somewhere on the autism spectrum and agoraphobic. Apu thinks of himself as an artist and wants to live accordingly (but still on Daddy’s dime). Dionysus (D) is gender conflicted. Beyond those details everything about them is a mystery: their real names, where they come from, and where they got their money. They move into a mansion in an exclusive neighborhood in Manhattan and soon become an object of fascination for René, a young man with dreams of becoming a filmmaker who lives in the neighborhood. He decides the family, with all its secrets, would be the perfect subject for a documentary, but the closer he gets to them the more tangled his life becomes with theirs. By the time The Golden House ends nothing will be as it began.
The rest of this review is at The Gilmore Guide to Books: http://wp.me/p2B7gG-2qd