When Bad Things Happen To Rich People

Literary schadenfreude in the age of Trump.

- Troy Patterson

It’s that time of year when talk turns to beach reads, those narratives appropriate for a vacationer’s seaside repose. The greatest such book is Tender Is the Night, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s fourth and (no arguing) best novel. It’s set on a beach, first of all, deploying the French Riviera as a stage on which we witness, with sympathy and delight, the misfortunes of the very fortunate. Its excellence resides in Fitzgerald’s eye for trampled glamour, his ear for voices full of money, and his penetrating wit, as when he describes a woman’s shadowy social position “as the wife of an arriviste who had not arrived.”

The glitziest exemplars from this season’s mailbag include Rich People Problems, the latest installment of Kevin Kwan’s franchise exploring the shopaholic progeny of East Asian tycoons, and The Destroyers, Christopher Bollen’s thriller about a disinherited New Yorker joining spoiled brats and sundry freeloaders on the Greek island of Patmos. But I prefer The People We Hate at the Wedding (Flatiron Books, $25.99), the third novel by Grant Ginder. The summer’s most compelling fictional exploration of affluence and envy, it skillfully mingles the introspective ways of a domestic novel with the juicy stratagems of a page turner.