Rumaan Alam’s bestselling novel Leave the World Behind was an inspired swirl of suspense, social commentary and apocalyptic disaster story. Given that it was published in the early fall of 2020, the novel eerily coincided with the “this-can’t-be-happening” atmosphere of denial and dread that prevailed during the first year of the pandemic. As a superb novel that unintentionally met its moment, Leave the World Behind is an almost impossible act to follow.
Maybe that’s why Entitlement, Alam’s just-published novel, is set earlier in the before-times of the Obama administration — what Alam’s main character, a 33-year-old Black woman named Brooke, thinks to herself as, “the good luck of a boring moment in the world’s long history.”
Brooke has just landed a job as a program manager at a foundation in Manhattan established by a white billionaire in his 80s named Asher Jaffee. Asher, whose only child, a daughter, “died at her desk at Cantor Fitzgerald” on Sept. 11, is determined to shed his fortune before his death.
Brooke, who’s abandoned a career teaching the arts at a charter school in the Bronx, is hired to help funnel Asher’s money to deserving causes. Midway through the novel, Brooke comes to believe that the most deserving cause is herself. This plot premise — the power of great wealth and elite society to corrupt a wide-eyed young person — has fueled many a story, particularly New York stories, from The Great Gatsby to The Devil Wears Prada.
Brooke, who’s adopted, is the daughter of a white single mother named Maggie, a lawyer who advocates for reproductive rights and who’s disappointed by her daughter’s new job. While lingering in the hallway outside her mother’s kitchen, Brooke overhears Maggie complain about her to a friend: “I spent a small fortune on Vassar and she’s a secretary to some zillionaire.” But Brooke is charged up by Asher’s faith in her and by the revelatory freedom of his life advice: “Demand something from the world. Demand the best. Demand it.”
And so she does, whipping out her corporate credit card to buy $1,000-dollar-heels at Saks; creatively fiddling with figures on a mortgage application to qualify for the kind of apartment that, as Brooke thinks to herself: “the place would be the thing to which she could tether her life. It would be her spouse, hold close her secrets, promise a steadfastness that people could not. People failed. The real estate market did not.”
Entitlement is about money, race, identity, privilege, class and consumption — inexhaustible topics that Alam has deftly and wittily explored in his earlier books. But, while there are scattered charged moments here, there’s an overall undercooked feel to this novel.
As a target for social criticism, Asher — the self-congratulatory old, white philanthropist being chauffeured around the city in his Bentley — is a character as broad and flat as a Times Square billboard.
Brooke, our protagonist, remains a cipher. When an aunt she seems to have been close to dies, Brooke “was baffled as to why she felt nothing at all," a void which, itself, is a cliché of fictional character development. On a night out with good friends that ends in an argument about inherited wealth, Brooke, we’re told again, “looked at her two oldest friends and felt, strangely, nothing.”
Neither Brooke nor Asher seems all that curious about themselves, their interior lives, which makes it harder for a reader to generate interest. They are vessels for ideas, rather than vital embodiments of how humans incorporate and sometimes resist those ideas.
The opening scene of this novel takes place in the subway where, as in the actual New York City of 2016, a psycho dubbed the "Subway Pricker” is jabbing women with a hypodermic needle. Brooke herself eventually falls victim and is infected with ... well, we don’t know with what exactly: maybe, metaphorically, the conviction that she, like Asher, is entitled to something bigger and better. Maybe. But as it happened, I hardly gave that creeper’s jab another thought, which is of a piece with my disappointment in this accomplished, yet strangely inert, novel.
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