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I kept wavering back and forth on this book. Sometimes I thought it was brilliant and other times I thought that it was tragically unsubtle. I also kept finding parts that I wanted to quote, because they were written so well and/or they described just how I felt. This was my first experience with this author, but I definitely want to read more by him now. The book covers so much territory including sons suffering from the sins of the father, identity fluidity and political commentary. It incorporates real events like terrorist attacks, a prison escape aided by a lovestruck prison employee and Trump's election (although using a different name for the clown-like, unqualified candidate).

The story is told through the eyes of a young, would-be film maker who thinks that the wealthy Golden family would make a great subject for a film. Nero Julius Golden comes from India to live in an old mansion in Greenwich Village with his three adult sons during the Obama administration. "[Nero] was majestic in all things, in his stiff-collared shirts, his cufflinks, his bespoke English shoes, his way of walking toward closed doors without slowing down, knowing they would open for him...and his often repeated dictum - one favored by absolute rulers from Caesar to Haile Selassie - that the only virtue worth caring about was loyalty." Each of the Goldens left his old identity behind and reinvented himself in America. Nero is later targeted by an expert Russian gold digger who has also reinvented herself and who comes prepared on their third date with a list of demands for cars, apartments and credit cards. The Goldens do very well in America until things begin to unravel for them (and for America).

As part of his political commentary, the author added how he feels as an artist and intellectual after the Trump election. "How does one live amongst one's fellow countrymen and countrywomen when you don't know which of them is numbered amongst the sixty million plus who brought the horror to power, when you can't tell who should be counted among the ninety million plus who shrugged and stayed home, or when your fellow Americans tell you that knowing things is elitist and they hate elites, and all you have ever had is your mind and you were brought up to believe in the loveliness of knowledge, not that knowledge-is-power nonsense but knowledge is beauty, and then all of that, education, art, music, film, becomes a reason for being loathed, and the creature of the Spiritus Mundi rises up and slouches toward Washington, DC to be born."

I was interested in the tragic arc of the lives of the Goldens and I totally identified with the author's despair about the direction of America. This was a fascinating, though messy, book.

I received a free copy of this book from the publisher.