Narrated by a young filmmaker neighbor, René, the novel follows Nero Golden and his three sons as they arrive in a Greenwich Village enclave on the day of a new president's inauguration to escape a hidden past in Bombay, and traces the family's unraveling over the following years of secrets, madness, and betrayal, ending in a fire that consumes the Golden house.
Books mentioned in The Golden House (14)
Lady Chatterley's Lover by D. H. Lawrence: epigraph: "Ours is essentially a tragic age..." —D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover
The Golden Ass by Apuleius: “for Apu I went back to The Golden Ass, but, in my story, metamorphosis was to be a different brother's fate”
The Satyricon by Petronius: “To get some clues to Petronius Golden I read The Satyricon and studied Menippean satire”
The Inheritors by William Golding: “I thought of the early Neanderthals in Golding's The Inheritors looking with anger and uncomprehending envy”
The Longest Journey by E. M. Forster: “My literary parents would no doubt have preferred that I refer, instead, to the climactic railway-tracks scene in Forster's The Longest Journey”
The Man Who Was Thursday by G. K. Chesterton: “Chesterton (he was a fan of The Man Who Was Thursday)”
The Shadow by Hans Christian Andersen: “I gave him to read the great short story "The Shadow" by Hans Christian Andersen about the man whose shadow detaches itself from him”
The Vagina Monologues by Eve Ensler: “their colleague forced to cancel a production of Eve Ensler's The Vagina Monologues”
Richard II by William Shakespeare: “"I come to sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the death of kings." The words of Shakespeare's Richard II”
Cyclops by Euripides: “I read the few extant satyr plays, Cyclops by Euripides, and the surviving fragments of The Net Fishers”
The Trackers by Sophocles: “the surviving fragments of The Net Fishers by Aeschylus and Sophocles' The Trackers”
Green Eggs and Ham by Seuss: “on a small bookshelf in the Chinatown apartment she kept seven books...Green Eggs and Ham, Twilight, The Silence of the Lambs, and The Hunt for Red October”
The Silence of the Lambs by Thomas Harris: “she kept seven books...Green Eggs and Ham, Twilight, The Silence of the Lambs, and The Hunt for Red October”
The Hunt for Red October by Tom Clancy: “she kept seven books...Green Eggs and Ham, Twilight, The Silence of the Lambs, and The Hunt for Red October”