In a post-44th president world, artists have increasingly found it their mission to comment on current events and cries of “fake news” and accusations of Russian interference, to try and capture the almost apocalyptic zeitgeist people around the country are feeling. With this, Americans look around them to find any kind of response that will encapsulate their feelings of fear and distrust in a world leaning toward mainstream fascism and a glorified bigotry threatening to swallow positive American values whole.

In comes acclaimed novelist Salman Rushdie, one of the latest authors to work his opinions about the country America is right now into fiction by placing the main character into a life and attitude much like the current president.

"Regardless of your political leanings, this tale of a larger-than-life patriarch and family embroiled in power and arrogance is one example of fictional commentary capturing the world today --- and its potential future."

THE GOLDEN HOUSE begins on the day of President Obama’s inauguration as Nero Golden, a tycoon whose perspective on life edges him towards narcissism (like a certain president), and his sons (who Nero raises to follow the same narcissistic manner and male superiority) move into “the Garden,” a historical community located in Greenwich Village in Manhattan. As they settle into the largest house in the community, the Murray mansion, fellow residents are intrigued by this family thought to possess “English [that] was immaculate, British-accented…almost certainly had Oxbridge educations,” a mysterious origin story, and a sense of foreboding danger wherever they went, “dangling his wickedness under our noses…convinced of his ability easily to defeat anyone who rose against him.”

Enter the auteur and narrator, call-him-Rene. Rene is a young filmmaker grieving the death of his parents and seeking to create a movie that will put him in the spotlight, “a mighty film, or a Dekalog-style sequence of films, dealing with…transformation, fear, danger, rationalization, romanticism, sexual change, the city, cowardice, and courage; nothing less than a panoramic portrait of [his] times.” This search ends up leaving him fascinated by the Golden family, and subsequently he becomes a family friend and more involved in their extravagant yet dangerous lives. Like Nick Carraway entangling himself with Jay Gatsby, Rene places himself into the dramas of Nero’s three eccentric sons and the quarrels surrounding them, Nero, and a tragic past that threatens to swallow them whole with the arrival of a new lady in Nero’s life. As Rene keeps his involvement with the Goldens and the threat surrounding their downfall, so builds the possibility that he will go down with them and not be able to recover.

Rushdie is typically an author who tends to stay in the realms of magical realism. But in writing a story undoubtedly set in the land of realism, THE GOLDEN HOUSE shines with enthralling characters and a narrator who is both passionate and endearing in a novel set with questions of how to deal with current politics, migration and transitions, and how our backgrounds can follow us to the ends of the earth, no matter what kind of changes we make. It is a book you must make time to read in order to be fully absorbed, forgive the overuse of (obvious) foreshadowing, and tolerate Rushdie’s message about the state of the nation, which can seem a bit wordy at times and in danger of overgeneralizing portions of the population.

Regardless of your political leanings, this tale of a larger-than-life patriarch and family embroiled in power and arrogance is one example of fictional commentary capturing the world today --- and its potential future.