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.
この記事は The New Yorker の September 23, 2024 版に掲載されています。
7 日間の Magzter GOLD 無料トライアルを開始して、何千もの厳選されたプレミアム ストーリー、9,000 以上の雑誌や新聞にアクセスしてください。
すでに購読者です ? サインイン
この記事は The New Yorker の September 23, 2024 版に掲載されています。
7 日間の Magzter GOLD 無料トライアルを開始して、何千もの厳選されたプレミアム ストーリー、9,000 以上の雑誌や新聞にアクセスしてください。
すでに購読者です? サインイン
YULE RULES
“Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point.”
COLLISION COURSE
In Devika Rege’ first novel, India enters a troubling new era.
NEW CHAPTER
Is the twentieth-century novel a genre unto itself?
STUCK ON YOU
Pain and pleasure at a tattoo convention.
HEAVY SNOW HAN KANG
Kyungha-ya. That was the entirety of Inseon’s message: my name.
REPRISE
Reckoning with Donald Trump's return to power.
WHAT'S YOUR PARENTING-FAILURE STYLE?
Whether you’re horrifying your teen with nauseating sex-ed analogies or watching TikToks while your toddler eats a bagel from the subway floor, face it: you’re flailing in the vast chasm of your child’s relentless needs.
COLOR INSTINCT
Jadé Fadojutimi, a British painter, sees the world through a prism.
THE FAMILY PLAN
The pro-life movement’ new playbook.
President for Sale - A survey of today's political ads.
On a mid-October Sunday not long ago sun high, wind cool-I was in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, for a book festival, and I took a stroll. There were few people on the streets-like the population of a lot of capital cities, Harrisburg's swells on weekdays with lawyers and lobbyists and legislative staffers, and dwindles on the weekends. But, on the façades of small businesses and in the doorways of private homes, I could see evidence of political activity. Across from the sparkling Susquehanna River, there was a row of Democratic lawn signs: Malcolm Kenyatta for auditor general, Bob Casey for U.S. Senate, and, most important, in white letters atop a periwinkle not unlike that of the sky, Kamala Harris for President.
