'The Golden House'

I've never liked Salman Rushdie's books or his writing. But since B has a copy of his latest book in her home, and I was waiting for her to finish her swim, I read 'The Golden House' (2017). And I hated it. That tone of his creeps through in every book. It's grating. I also couldn't stop rolling eyes at all the references to Greek mythology. (Reviews here, here, here and here.)

Set in contemporary times defined by Barack Obama's Presidency, real estate tycoon Nero Golden moved across continents from Mumbai to New York's City. Along with his three adult sons, they took on new names and identities in Manhattan. The family patriarch took the name Nero, and his sons are eldest son agoraphobic gamer Petronius (now Petya), middle son tortured artist Lucius Apulei (now Apu), and the youngest is gender-confused Dionysus (now just known as D). The arrival of Nero's new Russian wife Vasilisa drove his sons out of the family home.

Told in third person narrative by aspiring filmmaker René who is the Golden family's neighbor, he found them perfect for imagining a story. They had all the money, secrets, mysteries and perhaps a murder. In spite of having a girlfriend, Suchitra, René also has an affair with Vasilisa which results in a child. René has a tendency to ramble on, and he is, extremely irritating. If the author has ever intended this to be a criticism of the current state of affairs and the Presidency, then there's too much going on for all that to surface.

I knew that Nero Golden's interior weather was changeable, and that his sexual vulnerability to his wife's charms only increased as he grew older, and that the bedroom was where she invariably achieved the necessary alterations in his personal meteorology. But I didn't know then what I know now—that he wasn't well. Vasilisa, showing herself to be a master of timing, had sensed her opening and made her play. Before any of us, she saw what afterwards became sadly all too plain to us all: that he was weakening, that the time would soon come when he was non longer who he had been. She smelled the first intimation of that coming weakness as shark smells a single drop of blood in water, and moved in for the kill. 

Everything is a strategy. This is the wisdom of the spice. Everything is food. This is the wisdom of the shark.