Fall Books Preview

SALMAN RUSHDIE PLAYS THE TRUMP CARD

THE NOVELIST RETURNS WITH HIS 18TH BOOK, THE GOLDEN HOUSE, A POLITICAL ROMP THROUGH OUR TURBULENT TIMES

- Sarah Begley

IN THE PANTHEON OF LITERATURE, THE BEST novels manage to feel timeless even as they capture a snapshot of history, from Jane Austen examining Regency-era social mores in Pride and Prejudice to John Steinbeck depicting the Great Depression in The Grapes of Wrath. But writing about the present is a delicate balance—include too many gadgets, apps and cultural reference points, and your story quickly feels irrelevant.

Salman Rushdie has deftly walked that tightrope for decades. From his 1981 breakout novel Midnight’s Children, which covered everything from India’s bloody partition to the pangs of unrequited love, to 2005’s Shalimar the Clown, which took jihadism from Kashmir to Los Angeles, Rushdie has become a luminary by marrying the literary to the geopolitical. He takes on that task once again in his new novel, The Golden House, about a corrupt Indian businessman (alias: Nero Golden) who flees the Bombay mafia to start a new life with his three adult sons in New York City, picking up a Russian trophy wife along the way. Today’s hot-button issues get play, with gender transition, autism, free speech and nationalism all serving as plot points. Observing the Gatsbyesque splendor of the Goldens is the narrator René Unterlinden, a filmmaker planning to make a movie about his wealthy neighbors. In the same way that F. Scott Fitzgerald “defined a moment of Americanness,” Rushdie tells TIME on a recent afternoon in a book-lined room at his agent’s Manhattan office, “I wanted really just to smell what’s in the air.”