On the day of the new president’s inauguration, when we worried that he might be murdered as he walked hand in hand with his exceptional wife among the cheering crowds, and when so many of us were close to economic ruin in the aftermath of the bursting of the mortgage bubble, and when Isis was still an Egyptian mother-goddess, an uncrowned seventy-something king from a faraway country arrived in New York City with his three motherless sons to take possession of the palace of his exile, behaving as if nothing was wrong with the country or the world or his own story.
This opening to Salman Rushdie’s The Golden House (2017) promises much: the density to the weave of current events with Rushdie’s own invented story; the assurance that he thinks well of Michelle Obama and knows what grave danger her husband was in; the signature easy way with dualistic language (the Isis/ISIS business); a the Gatsby-like fairy tale with a secret hiding somewhere. There is promise too in the efficient way he absents the mother through the emotive and at the same time strictly factual “motherless sons,” and in the pairings of “bursting/bubble” and “possession/palace”. But the eight Obama years that follow disappoint, primarily by over-fulfilling all that promise.