good evening from los angeles. i'm tavis smiley. tonight a conversation about the latest novel and "new york times" best seller, the golden house. set between president obama's election and the current political climate. it tells the story of an indian businessman who moves to new york to start a new life. we're glad you joined us. a conversation with novelist sal monorushy in just a moment.

and by contributions to your pbs station from viewers like you. thank you. so please welcome him back to the program. the as i claimed author of looks like midnight children and out with his latest, it's called the golden house. sal mo solomon, glad you're back. >> good to be here. >> you can correct me if i'm wrong, i'm hearing that you're starting to get alittle bit annoyed by the comparisons that people are making to a particular character who has green hair in your book -- >> yeah. >> to another guy who's sort of

orange. you wrote the book, why are you getting annoyed by the comparisons? >> that's on purpose. that's the deliberate satirical idea, one of the characters says what's happening in america is the d.c., like comics, it's taking over d.c. >> yeah. spot character of the joker who has very, very white skin and green hair, and he's running for president. that stuff i'm not -- what i'm saying is it's a minor character. it's in the background of the story. the story is about somebody else. and that's just part -- he's like cackling at the edges of the story. >> that doesn't surprise me that anything that is trump-like is going to get -- >> all roads lead to trump. >> please don't say that. please don't say that. >> you could be talking about

baseball. and it goes back -- >> i think you're right about that. there's a reason for that. it reeks. still. since we're talking about -- tell me about the lead character in the story of the book. >> he has some things in common with the president as well, but he's from another part of the world. the story began in india, bombay, my hometown. what really happened over there which is a strange linkage between on the one hand, very, very wealthy people, and criminal mafias. so for example, the movie industry there is like a lot of mob money in the movies. you know, which used to be the days in hollywood. >> yeah. also between the criminal mafias and the terrorists who attack bombay from pakistan. and i thought, if i could put somebody in the middle of that, that would be an interesting character. so there's this wealthy indian businessman who gets involved in

the mob. and then his wife is killed in the terrorist attacks. and he and his three sons, decide we're out of here. they decide they're going to go far away to the other side of the world, change their names, be different people. they all have their own problems, and of course the tragedy that they think they've left behind, they haven't left behind. it comes after them. so that's really what the book's about. the other thing i wanted to do is to set it, right now. to set it like the day before yesterday. you know, and to do something in a way which is what you're not supposed to do, the exact moment in which you write it. the reason you're not supposed to do it, if you do it wrong, then your book becomes like

yesterday's paper. becomes like disposables. if you do it right. then you can capture a moment from all time. >> but i know you could handle it, i will. i've seen a lot of chatter from your fans and readers of the book who forgot actually when you wrote the story because it does in fact mirror what we're going through number one to this specific. >> i actually just about finished the book by the time of the election. but it was written like two years before. >> really. >> and the way you do it i think is you stay inside the characters. if you tried to make it too much like news, then that's -- that vanishes. the subject changes so fast. >> in this white house, here we are back to trump again, and in this white house, every other

hour. >> yes, too much news. you know -- >> yeah. >> so if you tie it too much to that then your book's going to get outdated before it's published. what you have to do is talk about how human beings are dealing with the situation. you know, how are we living in this world. you know, and if you stayed like that inside home nature, inside the characters, then that's a novel. then that's the thing that has a chance of sticking around. >> let me come to the pages of your real life where you talk about how you navigate in the moment. how do you navigate this moment? your first time voting as an american citizen was in this last sectioelection. >> that went well. >> do we have you to blame for that? for those of us who follow you, we've noted that you pretty just stopped tweeting. >> on that day. >> yes, i did. >> how are you navigating and

idea you disappear on twitter? >> i don't know whether -- i used to enjoy twitter. it was fun. i don't know if i changed, or it changed. it began to seem to me that i didn't like the tone of voice. i didn't like the noise that was being made on twitter. it seemed to become like almost like a lynch mob, you know, and ugly and badtempered. and people talking with incredible aggressiveness because they're protected by anonymity, in a way that they would never talk if they were sitting here. >> absolutely. >> but i thought i don't like this. and i don't know whether it got worse or i became less patient with it or some mixture of that. but i thought i don't need this noise in my head, and i quit, i stopped. >> i'm curious to get your take on this. there are a lot of people who feel, and i express this view on my own in certain instances feel

that there are certain fellow citizens who feel emboldened by the behavior of the guy in the white house and so when the president can behave that way -- >> so can we. >> you're right. we have the anonymity on social media to throw bombs and, throw bombs, rocks, whatever, and hide our hand. do you think there's anything to the fact that people are emboldened by his bad behavior? >> absolutely. i think, i think there's no question that white supremacists in this country have felt enabled by the trump victory. and we see that. we see that in charlottesville, we see it everywhere. i'm just -- it's worth pointing out it's not only america that this is happening. >> sure. >> europe. >> in india where modi as prime minister is doing something very similar. he's cranking up kind of hindu extremists politics and minorities of which the largest is the muslim minority. being targeted. there's people being lynched. there are people -- journalists

being murdered on the doorsteps of their homes, et cetera. this is again, you can't say that it's a directly attributable to the government, but it's people feeling exactly in the same way. emboldened, enabled, feeling that they have the right to behave like this. >> i'm throlistening to you. i'm thinking about muslims catching hell there. >> that's happening. >> what is your read on why this sort of mindset isn't just within the u.s. borders. it's happening around the globe. trump is one of the more recent examples, elsewhere before we got there. >> there's globalized capitalism, a a sense that that benefits a tiny minority of the country and that everybody else is basically ignored, you know, and then if somebody comes along saying i can fix that, you know, i can make you great again.

people are going to listen. and i think because there's a real disillusion with the system. and on top of that. i think one of the big dangers of the, of the internet, is the way in which truth itself becomes so subjective, you know, people can say anything on the internet, and it sounds as truthful as anything else, except some of it's truth and some of it's lies. there's a famous quote of abraham lincoln on the left. >> it's stuff like that. it's full of people allegedly saying things. >> yeah. >> that they never said. you know, and i think when you -- when people are in a situation where you don't know what's true anymore, you know, and then a strong man rises up and says just follow me, i am the truth, you know, it works. >> what's behind all the angst and anger that you referenced on twitter and social media as well. what's behind that?

>> first thing we have to say is that race is behind it. i think that there were, there was a substantial part of the population of this country that could not stand it, that for eight years, there was a black man in the white house. could not stand it. thought that might be the beginning of a better attitude on race issues, you know, but it seems to -- instead have created a kind of backlash. so, there's race. there was a whole massage nisic thing about hillary clinton. i mean, i was quite surprised that this country seems still not to be ready for a woman leader. and then i think there was this sense of in some parts of the country that they were being -- people were thought they were being ignored.

that were sort of on the scrap heap, and all of that kbaned, it's like a perfect storm. >> let me swing this way and i'll swing back since we're talking about the election and since you are a writer extraordinary, what do you make of the way that hillary has handled looking back with her own book. a lot of backlash, pushback on the way that playing to the narrative that people didn't like about her. what's your read on it? >> the truth is every politician loses a campaign writes a book. it's like she's not unique in this. and i think, you know, there's a lot of man explaining going on, there's a lot of men telling hillary not to write a book, they would not do if it was let's say bernie sanders. bernie sanders has a book, nobody says he shouldn't write it. you know. >> but i don't think the

critique is that she shouldn't write a book, it's what she's written in the book. >> well, the thing is, you know, there are things we don't know about this election. which, and i mean i haven't read her book, i've read the stuff about it, and i know that she's suggesting that the trump people were collaborating with the russians in order to try and fix the election to put it bluntly. and i don't know if that's true. i'm waiting to see like everybody else when to see what the mueller investigation says, but she has every right to say that if she thinks it. i mean, i have no plan to read her book. >> yeah. >> but by and large, i think that the election's over. you know, and that, and that we need to turn the page. and that really we need -- >> that's what she wants you to do. she wants us to turn the back pages. >> talking about the next pages. yeah, i think the democrats

need, we need somebody much younger, you need a next generation. if you see what's happened in canada with justin trudeau or even in france with mr. macron, the fact that this is a kind of younger generation -- >> we had that with obama. we just went through a. >> we need to get it back. we need to get it back. obama was unusually charismatic leader. you know. but we need somebody like that. we can't have 200-year-old people fighting for the next election. >> unpack for me why you are so direct, so bold about saying you have no intention to read hillary's book, and i'm asking that because for a guy who voted for the first time and saw what happened to her, like why would you not want to read her story? >> i watched every day of the election. >> yeah. >> the election up to here. and what i'm trying to think about is the next thing. you know, and hillary is not the next thing. you know, i mean, i admire her, but she ain't the future. you know, and that's what i'm interested in. >> i quoted so many times on

this program the great paul roebson, i think he's a great american hero, often overlooked. i quote him because he was right when he said that artists are the gate keepers of truth. i believe that. with every core of my being. the flipside of that though is in moments like these, and you are -- you're eloquent, not just articulate, but eloquent in talking about what this moment means and yet what you write is fiction. the question is whether or not you ever feel like writing fiction in a moment where the nonfiction of our lives is so real, you know where i'm going with this? ever feel out of place or wasting your time? >> no, fiction, you know, historically, fiction has been one of the great ways of telling the truth. you know, if you gee -- >> agreed -- >> if you think about war and peace is the most, the most brilliant trait of the russian campaign. et cetera, so fiction itself is just another road to the truth. what i do think has happened,

certainly to me, i can't speak for other writers, but to me, is it's made me question and set aside some of the ways i've been writing. i've been associated with the kind of fantasy what gets called magic realism, you know, and in fact my previous novel, which was also novel set in new york, you know, was a novel of that kind.genies and flying carpet. in a world where there's so much untruth out there, so much make believe being propagated every day, that maybe not fantasy. you know, maybe not hold the flank up. and maybe there's a role for artists or at least i felt a role for an artist like me to start reestablishing the truth. between the writer and the reader at least. some sense of this is how it really is. you know, and let's stop trying to agree on what is really the

case. >> uh-huh. >> because we do live in this country in which people can't agree on what is the case. >> uh-huh. >> you know, i find myself lecturing to a quite conservative crowd in florida a few months ago, in which they didn't believe in climate change, they thought the "new york times" was fake news. i said youns it's only fake news when they review my books. >> you know, there is no such thing as climate change. we live in these different realities. >> and then irma hit florida. >> exactly. well it's kind of snooping around all of trump's properties. i mean, proving there is no god. but it's -- i think becoming very important for america as a country to regain a sense of the difference between truth and lies. and what nature can do, if you do it right, is that the reader and the write can make that

agreement. you can read a book, a book, and you can say yeah, this is how it is. this is how it is. >> has that line between what is true and what is false -- the line clearly has been breached. we blurred the line, but is the damage done from that ir repable, put another way, trump did that and won. and he continues to do that and his tweet -- i always tell people, i'm not so much impressed by the pushback that donald trump gets when you put something crazy out. what blows me away are the number of times he gets retweeted.

>> even in the last six or seven months have shaken them. around like 38%, it just stays there, no matter what happens. whether that's enough to get him reelected, i don't know. got him elected once. what i think may happen is first of all, that there are opposition leaders who can speak as persuasively to the american people as he has -- >> right. >> and which somehow hillary did not do. >> right. >> you know, so that's one thing. the other thing i think is then people, you know, when reality bites is when they notice that things are not working out the way they think they're going to. you know, i mean, coal is coming back. no matter what trump promised. it's just not. and a lot of the jobs he says he will get back are impossible to get back because basically they'd be taken over by robots. they're not being taken over by chinese people. they're taken over by -- >> or mexicans. >> yeah. so when people begin to see that

the promises aren't being delivered, then hopefully that will detach people from him. >> you used the word hopefully just now. what your book does for us at the very least, even though there are trues and we appreciate that, but they do at their best is allow us some sense of escapism. because the question is whether or not escapism really matters when a society is experiencing hopelessness. is escape a real alternative to hopelessness? >> escapism, i think it's just -- i hope that what books can do at their best is to make you reimagine things. make you see -- make you see the world in a slightly -- at a slightly different angle. you know, and which just helps you think about it. this book's quite funny. funny is good because political

funny is good, because in this particular case, we have a president who's so thin-skinned, which is nice. >> i was in a conversation last night, making sure i should raise this on television. i'm sure i'll get mail for this, but we're into it now. but in line of political funny is another line that's being blurred. so for example, i didn't find is funny that sean spicer showed up -- >> nor did i. >> sean spicer and donald trump are dangerous people. and leave it to hollywood to turn it into a freaking joke, shows up at the emmy awards -- this is not jokes and laughter to me. this guy, and what he represents and what they represent is dangerous for our democracy. you can't tweet one day that it's dangerous for democracy and the next he's playing along with a skit -- i don't get that. >> it's enabling him. i thought that was a bad misfire. bad misfire. i don't know. i switched the emmy's off, they

were boring. but i thought that was a bad mistake. >> it just troubles me because i think we were talking about again, things that are really dangerous for our democracy, and what we make jokes and laughter about this. i think satire is a very sharp of edged sword. and not u just of this presidency, but ever since the george w. bush presidency, i've been grateful to comedians, you know, to steven colbert and jon stewart and -- >> john oliver, all of them. >> trevor noah. >> yeah. . they've been providing some of the most pointing political critiq critique. doing the job which may be the mainstream media should be doing. >> what do you make of -- you listed of the late night

comedians. what do you think of the mainstream media is or isn't doing getting at the real story. >> i think they're trying, i think the papers like the times and the washington post are trying very hard, but sometimes they get it horribly wrong. you know, i went on election day, the "new york times" had a gathering in their theater, at like 7:00 p.m., all their heavy hit tlers from the editor downwards. all the main commentators. they had no idea what was about to happen. they were talking about how the headline was going to be madame president, you know, and this is like two hours later. two hours later, trump was president. 7:00 p.m., the "new york times" had no idea. so that made me think, you guys are not nearly as smart as you think you are. >> yeah. what do you make of how badly they and everybody else missed the mark? >> everybody, but i think the person most surprised was donald trump. >> i totally agree. i think he still is. >> and i don't think he wanted the job. certainly can't do it.

>> yeah. he's announced some show that it was harder than his previous job. >> you know, what you want to do is first of all tell a good story. you want people to be engaged with the characters and care about them and care about what happens to them. that's the most -- but then, if you're trying to write this kind of a social novel, which tries to deal with, you know, take a panoramic look at what's going on, because there's all sorts of things in this book, occupy wall street, all kinds of things get in there. then i think there's two things i hope for for readers. one is for like now, contemporary leaders, read it and they have the pleasure of recognition. they have the pleasure of saying, yeah, this is how it is. this is how it's been.

>> right. >> and then, hopefully, if i've done it right, then in the future, when people read it, they can say, oh, i see that's how it was. because you captured the moment. so from readers today, i hope that they'll read it and say oh yeah, this is really, really good portrayal of how things have been. >> you have it from the author, the book is called "the golden house," the latest. good have you back. >> always good. >> that's our show tonight, thanks for watching. and as always, keep the faith. for more information on today's show, visit tavis smiley at pbz.org. join me next time for a conversation about a bill to impeach donald trump. that's next time, we'll see you then.

and by contributions to your pbs station from viewers like you. thank you.

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