When Salman Rushdie began work on his second novel, “Midnight’s Children” (1981), the one that would make his name, he realized, he has written, that he could not write his book “in cool Forsterian English. India was not cool. It was hot. It was hot and overcrowded and vulgar and loud and it needed a language to match that,” and he would try to find that language.

Find that language he did, in “Midnight’s Children” and “The Satanic Verses” and several of the excellent novels that followed. Increasingly, however, Rushdie has left cool English so far behind that his fiction has grown bombastic and close to unreadable.

His new novel, “The Golden House,” is his 13th. Each sentence in it is a Cirque du Soleil leap into a net that only he can see. Each sentence seems to be composed of stardust, pixie dust, fairy dust, angel dust, fennel pollen and gris-gris powder, poached in single-udder butter, fried and refried, encrusted with gold as if it were a Gustav Klimt painting, and then dotted with rhinestones.

All gestures here are grand gestures; all soirées are glittering soirées; all mirrors are magic mirrors; every ferocity is a genuine ferocity; every grill is a brazier; every regret a bitter one.