Book review: The Golden House, by Salman Rushdie

If someone wanted to write a cruel parody of a Salman Rushdie novel, they might very well come up with Salman Rushdie’s new novel, The Golden House. It takes every one of his tropes and tricks and twitches, adds in a healthy dose of liberal smugness, and then preens itself for good measure. I have had a great deal of suspicion about Rushdie’s oeuvre since around the time of Haroun And The Sea Of Stories or The Moor’s Last Sigh – and I write this as someone who once thrilled to his earlier work. His autobiographical book about the fatwa issued by Ayatollah Khomeini – Joseph Anton: A Memoir – had moments of brilliance, but was fundamentally hamstrung by his craven pining, his need for approval from the glitterati. This is that without the flashes of what once made him interesting.