Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ

In Midnight's Children, Rushdie diabolizes Indira Gandhi in the form of The Widow, one of his most terrifying caricatures: ‘green and black the Widow’s hair and clutching hand and children mmff and little balls and one-by-one and torn-in-half and little balls go flying green black her hand is green her nails are black as black.� Some years later, in The Satanic Verses, he tried something similar by turning Britain's Prime Minister into ‘Mrs Torture�. Now � no longer plain old Rushdie but an ennobled Sir Salman � he has Donald J. Trump in his sights, reimagined in The Golden House as ‘the Joker�, come to exploit an America stupid from superhero movies.

The origins of the Joker were disputed, the man himself seemed to enjoy allowing contradictory versions to fight for air space, but on one fact everyone, passionate supporters and bitter antagonists, was agreed: he was utterly and certifiably insane. What was astonishing, what made this an election year like no other, was that people backed him because he was insane, not in spite of it. What would have disqualified any other candidate made him his followers' hero. Sikh taxi drivers and rodeo cowboys, rabid alt-right blondes and black brain surgeons agreed, we love his craziness, no milquetoast euphemisms from him, he shoots straight from the hip, says whatever he fucking wants to say, robs whatever bank he's in the mood to rob, kills whoever he feels like killing, he's our guy.

The Joker is a background presence in this book and only gets talked about in the final third; the main focus is on the immigrant vulgarian Nero Golden, who is himself a Trumpian analogue, with the same speech patterns, putative wealth, and need to put his name ‘on everything from hot dogs to for-profit universities�. The growth of Nero's empire in the US, and its effect on his three sons, forms the narrative arc of the novel, as observed by our narrator, the Belgian-American filmmaker René.

Several problems. The main one is that the story is not especially engaging: for the most part we just plod along, hearing little snippets of soap-opera gossip from each son in turn, related to us in a strangely distant, elegiac tone that strips away any immediacy from the prose. One longs for a hint of that exuberance that marked Rushdie's writing in the 80s and early 90s. Narrator René compares himself to Isherwood at some point � ‘I am a camera� � and comments, ‘Maybe I'm a smart camera. I record, but I'm not exactly passive.� But despite his involvement in the plot, he is passive, and I didn't care about a single person he described. The writing is terribly pedestrian for someone who has written the kind of things Rushdie has written. While Indira Gandhi's India and Thatcher's Britain were explored from within, experientially, Trump's America is simply pointed at, like a news report, and said to be awful.

Along the way there are some game efforts to examine the key concerns of twenty-first-century America � the youngest Golden son, for instance, feels uncomfortable as a man and is encouraged to transition to a different gender. I thought at first that this might be an interesting exploration, building on a fleeting reference to India's hijra tradition, but the results are disappointing: he meets a sticky end and his social-justice girlfriend comes to the conclusion that identity politics are all a big mistake after all. I am not unsympathetic to that view, but here it just felt a lot more like the thoughts of a seventy-year-old author than a twentysomething arts curator. Ian McEwan also touched on this subject in Nutshell, but the difference is that McEwan's prose was pure fireworks.

Occasionally there are outright blunders. This could have come from Dan Brown:

In the game of chess the move known as the Queen's Gambit is almost never used because it gives up the most powerful piece on the board for the sake of a risky positional advantage. Only the true grandmasters would attempt so daring a maneuver […] the laying down of the queen to kill the king.

The queen's gambit involves putting a pawn on the fourth rank during the opening, and has nothing to do with sacrificing the queen as a piece.

To be sure, when Rushdie is talking about things that I think he cares about � primarily the 2016 US election and the 2008 Mumbai attacks � the energy picks up a bit, the sentences become more breathless and pacy, and you start to take notice. I loved, for example, his heartfelt reflection of how people coped with the dazed sense of reality after Trump was elected:

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 élitist and they hate élites, 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 out of Spiritus Mundi rises up and slouches toward Washington, D.C., to be born.

Perhaps it is worth reading the book for the paragraphs like this that crop up in its final sections. But I wish he had just written an article about Trump, and not tried to buttress it up with all the architecture of a novel, filled with characters I never had much interest in. (Nor, I suspect, did he.) In the future, I think it may be interesting to look back on The Golden House as an example of how great writers reacted to Trump's win as it was happening, but perhaps there isn't enough distance yet to really treat the subject with the full artistic arsenal that it demands. In this case, it's more of a gilded failure than the twenty-four-carat success I was crossing my fingers for.