What Vikram Seth says of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin can be said with equal justification about his book The Golden Gate – ‘like champagne/Its effervescence stirs my brain’ (5.5). This wonderful artefact, ‘tour de force of tour de forces’ (John Hollander), ‘the Great California Novel’ (Gore Vidal on dust-jacket), ‘the perfect book of the 1980's’ (publisher's blurb)–in 594, fourteen-line stanzas of iambic tetrameter – is certainly, to use a phrase from The New York Times review, ‘a splendid achievement’ (quoted in Leslie, 4). Indeed, The Golden Gate has generally received high praise as a zesty, trendy, scintillating and warm portrayal of modern Californian life, ‘an up-to-date tale of San Francisco's “Yuppiedom'‘ (Ionnone, 54).

In this chapter I shall look at the early reception of the novel to argue that The Golden Gate, much more than these things, is a sort of enquiry into the meaning of life in the contemporary world; that it is, above all, a book about love, pacifism, tolerance and compassion. What emerges is not a celebration of Yuppiedom, but a severe critique and rejection of it. In short, I find the book anti-materialistic and, ultimately, ‘spiritual’ in the values that it propounds.