"The Golden House" by Salmon Rushdie - Review

"The alphabet is where all our secrets begin."

It's sentences like that that cause readers to jeer Salmon Rushdie's new book "The Golden House".

It's also sentences like that that make it great because it is undeniably true.

This is the story of a rich  immigrant family that tries to bury its dark past in bright American dreams. Classical  history and literature about power, family and tragedy and current events about  power, family and tragedy echo and crash into each other in this story. The title itself harkens back to Nero's Domus Aurea in all its splendor and ruin. All its splendor and ruin. It examines the eternal struggle  between identity and fate.

The novel's structure is complex. The family's backstory is told not in flashbacks, but rather in a series of nesting stories. Each time the story goes back in time,  we get a smaller and more precise framing of the family's past and each time we go forward we get a bigger flash forward of its tragic future. (Similar to the way "This is Us" tells its story.) This is a remarkable feat of storytelling.

This novel is also a coming of age story and also a New York story and also a political story and also a crime story. This review has barely scratched the surface. You may hear that it is "too much".  You may also hear that there is too much surface and no depth. But I recommend it if you're ready for a book where the mythical Baba Yaga inside a conniving woman complains of flying commercial the way she does broomsticks; where a man refrains from suicide to avoid messing up the carpet; where the grand scope of an act of  terrorism meets its match in the depth of a domestic tale of infidelity and maternal honor; where both Donald Trump and Barack Obama make an entrance.

Yep, it's that crazy of  a crazy ride.