There was a time – the early part of his writing career – when I waited eagerly for every new novel by Salman Rushdie.  Midnight’s Children, Shame, The Satanic Verses: these were the books I recommended to all my friends in the 1980s.  I loved the exuberance, energy, and inventiveness of those early novels.  Then something happened.  I stopped loving Rushdie’s books.  I was reluctant to admit it at first, so I persevered.  It felt more and more like hard work. I found them too self-regarding, too self-conscious, too showy.  I couldn’t see what he was trying to do with all that brilliance.

With The Golden House, I feel to some extent that “my” Salman Rushdie is back.  The brilliance and “look at me” cleverness hasn’t gone away.  He still loves to cram as much life into a single sentence as most novelists manage in an entire book.  But, just as he did with The Satanic Verses, here he’s found a subject worthy of all that snap, crackle, and pop – the USA in the early 2000s or, more specifically, New York in the final years of the Obama presidency.  Rushdie moved to New York many years ago and The Golden House, like his earlier Fury,  is very much a meditation on the state of his adopted home town and country.

Like all his novels, this one is stuffed full of references to other books: the New Testament, ancient Greek classics, Hindu sacred writings, F. Scott Fitzgerald, P.G. Wodehouse, T.S. Eliot, and many, many more.  Unless he wants us to believe that his narrator is precociously well-read for a young wannabee movie director, it’s tough to shrug off the feeling that Rushdie can’t resist trying to impress us with his erudition.  The many allusions to the giants of cinema – Bergman, Altman, Kurosawa and others – are more forgivable, but it can all get a little wearing after a while.  Rushdie has never been one for “less is more”.  But, come to think of it, neither has New York, the ultimate “look at me” society.

This is by no means a perfect novel.  It’s too long and should have been pruned by an editor courageous enough to call Rushdie when he becomes a showy windbag.  But there’s a much bigger problem, for which I can’t blame the author.  America and New York in 2017 have become so grotesque that they stand beyond parody, beyond satire.  Maybe it’s simply too soon to write the definitive novel about the ascent of Trump and the shameful conditions that made it possible.