OTHER PEOPLE'S MONEY

Proximity to wealth proves perilous in Rumaan Alam’ novel Entitlement.”

- Laura Miller

After love, money is perhaps the novel’s favorite subject, especially the novel in its most hopelessly (or, depending on your taste, endearingly) bourgeois form. Whether handled with Trollope’s irony or Fitzgerald’s romanticism, money in fiction challenges love’s delusion that our lives are defined by anything other than the hardest of practicalities, and that’s one reason money versus love is a venerable theme. But what if the two ostensibly opposing forces collapsed into each other, forming a sort of black hole? That would be enough to drive anyone around the bend, which is just what happens to Brooke Orr, the protagonist of Rumaan Alam’s fourth novel, “Entitlement.”

Alam is best known for “Leave the World Behind” (adapted into a film by Netflix), in which a Black couple bearing news of a mysterious catastrophe arrive at the Long Island summer house they’ve rented out to a white family for the week. Although that novel’s characters are familiar types (the Karen-ish white lady in her forties and her inept professor husband; the no-nonsense Black financier), Alam’s observation of the attitudes and trappings of contemporary upper-middle-class American life has a delicious precision. His shopping lists are as vivid as poems. “Entitlement,” which benefits from that precision, features themes Alam has touched on before: transracial adoption; the rivalrous friendships of ambitious young New Yorkers and the wedge that economic disparity drives between them; the complex tissue of privilege and status that makes up cosmopolitan social life. But the tone of this novel grows darker and more claustrophobic than that of any of his previous works, even the apocalyptic “Leave the World Behind.” Never has one of his characters so thoroughly decompensated. Brooke’s fateful move is merely to take a job at a foundation dedicated to giving away the fortune accumulated by an office-supply magnate named Asher Jaffee, but the proximity to so much money unhinges her.