It is a lot easier to dream up a decent farce than it is to actually write one:
The Chateau had so much potential. In an opening scene a plastic surgeon known as The Butt God of Miami falls to his death from the top floor of a Miami Beach condo. William Katzenelenbogen, just fired from his job at the Washington Post, heads from D.C. to his father's condo to investigate because The Butt God was William's roommate in college. Dad's condo is filled with elderly, Jewish, Russian millionaires who made their money on shady, mostly illegal transactions. The old Russians say crazy things about Donald Trump (they love him), one another (they hate all their neighbors), and about America (it's an easy system to manipulate for financial gain.) The old fogies battle for control of the condo's board of directors, where kickbacks from illegal contracts are most lucrative, spy on one another, curse in Russian at their neighbors, but otherwise not much happens. Goldberg is trying to make a statement that Trump's presidency, aided as it was by Russian intrusions, is not so different from Putin's, but unfortunately the book is not put together well enough to be a mystery (how did the Butt God of Miami really die?), a political statement, or even a farce. Like William's response to finding himself tending to his father the crook, I, too, thought the best solution to this book was a large bottle of cheap vodka.
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