Rumaan Alam is a rarity: a male novelist who specializes in female viewpoints. The viewpoints in question are themselves specialized. They focus on the bourgeois adventures of New York City up-and-comers, adventures in which universal quests — for family, for a home, for material security, for social standing — are intensified and glamorized by the dramatic particulars of life in the big city. The intensity and the glamour come down, in the end, to money. To survive and thrive in New York, you usually need a lot of it.
This reality is not lost on Brooke Orr, the protagonist of “Entitlement.” The 33-year-old Black adopted daughter of a white single mother, Brooke is the beneficiary of a privileged, hyper-liberal background involving a Vassar education, a lawyer parent who runs an organization for reproductive justice, and a supportive, vividly multiracial entourage of prosperous college buddies and well-connected solicitous family friends. The diversity and social capital of this cast of characters are not gratuitous. Their significance, we come to realize, is that even a well-off, well-meaning and well-dressed upbringing are no defense against Mammon’s enchanting, debasing influence.
Enter Asher Jaffee, an octogenarian self-made billionaire whose almost inconceivable net worth has been amassed through successive careers in “paper. Then catalogs. Then malls. Then real estate.” Jaffee and his wife have set up an altruistic entity, the Asher and Carol Jaffee Foundation, whose purpose is to give away their money.
This turns out not to be a straightforward enterprise, in part because the Jaffee fortune keeps growing, of its own accord, like giant kelp — “If we’re making more than we’re giving away, we’re failing,” a foundation employee remarks. And the usual challenges of doing effective philanthropy are in this case exacerbated by the fact that the philanthropist, Jaffee, is vague and whimsical about his charitable objectives. When a subordinate suggests to him that “we must deal with the world as it is,” the boss responds: “We’re changing that world.”
Brooke is hired to help. Even though she is an inexperienced and inept junior employee (her title is program coordinator), the foundation is a tiny organization, and soon enough she catches Jaffee’s eye: “This woman, Brooke, Black, gorgeous, serious, passionate, was the sort of woman he wanted at the foundation, the sort of woman he wanted working in his name. It was electric, almost chemical.” Jaffee turns Brooke into his sidekick and companion. They have very fancy fun together. They secretly buy a huge Helen Frankenthaler painting as a birthday present for Mrs. Jaffee, they go to Lincoln Center to hear a performance of Mozart’s Masonic funeral music, they drink whiskey and quote Shelley’s “Ozymandias” as they contemplate Central Park from the old tycoon’s enormous, glass-walled Fifth Avenue apartment. “This was Asher Jaffee’s vantage on reality,” Alam writes. “It was out there, somewhere, distant, something to look down on with amusement.”
It feels like the setup of a familiar drama about workplace power and its abuses, but Alam has something more interesting in mind. Brooke, until that point something of a stock protagonist who elicits our stock sympathy, begins to undergo a strange psychological germination, like one of those seeds that need fire to sprout; it’s as if the burning proximity of extreme wealth has stimulated her metamorphosis. Suddenly we find ourselves approaching Tom Ripley territory.
Brooke is convinced that Asher Jaffee, by virtue of his wealth — a word that doesn’t appear in the novel; Alam insists on the less genteel “rich” — enjoys the true “freedom” she desires. Consciously refusing that word’s connotations in the African American political tradition, the protagonist defines freedom as essentially a private, personal circumstance that’s both material and ineffable. She becomes increasingly convinced, in increasingly deranged ways, that she has the right to have what she wants, even if she cannot yet afford it.
Wants, not needs: The distinction, derived from the world of advertising, is an important and explicit theme of the novel. Among them is a new selfhood: “Brooke wanted to be a different person. It came with such clarity that it was frightening. Change her. Save her.” This desire is connected to the tormenting notion that “we’re being deceived,” as she says to a college friend, who, ironically, works as an advertising executive. “There’s another place, adjacent to this one, so much better I don’t know how to explain it.”
Alam is best known for his third novel, the blackly surreal “Leave the World Behind,” which was a finalist for the National Book Award and the subject of a Netflix movie starring Julia Roberts and Mahershala Ali. The success of that book comes from its suspenseful elusiveness; you never quite know what the author is up to. “Entitlement” — a psychological thriller that subtly turns into a vicious exposé of affluent liberalism — also sneaks up on you, and wins you over.
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