THE SIMP, by Roshan Sethi
In 2023, an advertisement seeking a personal assistant for an unnamed New York “Art World Family” went viral. Many were shocked by the job’s ridiculously demanding purview, which included arranging meetings and travel, handling child care and “dog systems,” cleaning, repairs and gardening. The prime directive: to “make life easier for the couple in every way possible.”
What also astonished was how guilelessly these coddled people detailed their requirements in such vulgar detail. Some wondered who would ever want this gig, and at a lowball salary to boot. Roshan Sethi’s “The Simp,” billed, like Thackeray’s “Vanity Fair,” as a “novel without a hero,” and dedicated to “the anonymous family whose real-life advertisement inspired this work of fiction,” attempts to answer that question with sly, comic verve.
Sethi sets the action in Los Angeles, and the ad our non-hero, an unemployed actor named Raj Ladlani, answers is placed by an “entertainment family.” We are now in the realm of Hollywood satire, and this debut novelist demonstrates a strong feel for the mode. Perhaps it’s no surprise, for Sethi is also a successful filmmaker — not to mention a practicing oncologist.
Despite, or maybe because of, his titular nickname, Raj is a fascinating character, full of rich contradictions. A young gay man from a wealthy New Delhi family, he studied drama at U.S.C. and is now pursuing stardom. His parents, disappointed by his refusal to take up the family auto parts business, cut him off before leaving him an orphan.
Given the dearth of roles for a brown-skinned actor, Raj ekes out a living with menial labor and spends the rest of his time doing scene work — Shakespeare, Chekhov, Mamet — with his elderly coach, who alone exults in his protégé’s gifts. “You are a truthful actor,” he tells Raj. “You lie truthfully.” It is the teacher’s “highest praise.”
Raj lies less truthfully on his résumé, and his faked experience, along with a fabricated sob story about an impoverished upbringing in rural India, convinces Jim and Anna, white Hollywood A-listers, that Raj is the perfect (servile, discreet, grateful) man for the position. Soon Raj’s days are subsumed by an endless flurry of tasks in service to this performatively sensitive power couple and their heartbreakingly neglected child.
When not attending to his administrative duties or going to Erewhon to buy lamb and kale for Anna’s pit bull, Raj must navigate the mind games of Jim, a post-Tarantino auteur whose hobbies include ironic racism, vigorous swims in his house’s glass-bottomed pool and complaining bitterly about interruptions to his creative process.
It’s Jim who first calls his overly agreeable assistant a “simp,” along with other belittlements. Soon Raj suffers a series of “leaks,” moments when he finds the pressure of being the consummate, self-erasing factotum too crushing to bear.
Temporary relief arrives with escalating episodes of reckless behavior, including phone hacks, closet break-ins, and an autoerotic interlude in his employers’ guest room where he conjures fantasies of “rude, brisk” entertainment execs ravishing him “mercilessly.” Sethi’s arch narration strikes a fine balance between tenderness and rebuke for his protagonist’s self-loathing and duplicities.
Beneath the novel’s deadpan, stinging depictions of this rarefied Tinseltown milieu, “The Simp” also explores the painful but, in Sethi’s hands, bleakly comic ways race and colonial history collide with the dream of fame. The story is set in 2021, after the Black Lives Matter movement has shaken but not upended Hollywood. “You guys have all the power now,” Jim tells Raj, and though he claims he’s joking, we know folks like him are feeling rather fragile.
We also know, with hindsight, that despite some equity inroads, most of the faces at the studios and galas will remain pale. But what haunts the novel in an intriguing fashion is the question of how much of Raj’s showbiz flailing can be chalked up to his skin color, and how much to the fact that his chops and charisma are insufficient in a Hollywood system where nearly nobody makes it anyway.
“The Simp” is refracted, at times, through a potpourri of cultural sources, from Thackeray to “Pilgrim’s Progress,” “King Lear,” “Slumdog Millionaire,” the Zac Efron vehicle “Gold,” the life of the Buddha. But by the close, we are back with Raj, who may or may not achieve thespian success, but who has found a tiny arena where his talents might shine for a lucky few.
Still, what this exceedingly smart and funny novel finally suggests is that until the world isn’t run by rich, entitled monsters, most of us are going to pass at least a portion of our time on Earth in some degree of simpitude. Or as Howard, the couple’s Black cook, who seems to take a more philosophical approach to the situation, explains: “It’s a job.”
THE SIMP | By Roshan Sethi | Simon & Schuster | 292 pp. | $28
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