Longtime readers of Rumaan Alam will recognise the formula deployed in his fourth novel, Entitlement. As in 2018’s That Kind of Mother and 2020’s Leave the World Behind, narrative thrust depends on interactions between white and Black characters: in this case, the 33-year-old Brooke Orr (Black), a disillusioned former teacher, and her new employer, a billionaire named Asher Jaffee (white), who in his winter years has decided to give away his fortune via an eponymous foundation. In the early stages of their relationship, Asher imparts to Brooke advice that will damn her for the rest of the novel: “Demand something from the world. Demand the best. Demand it.” He dubs her his protege.
From there, Alam constructs a series of neatly corresponding variations between the two which, put together, amount to a portrait of America circa 2014. Asher wants to get rid of money. Brooke wants to acquire it. For Brooke, the years after 9/11 occasioned an economy “frail enough that [she] fled home, found a part-time stint at a shop that sold (yes) high-end yarn”. For Asher, 9/11 gave rise to more wealth, however unintended. Brooke is ambivalent about race, having “spent most of her time with white people, who never discussed [it] … because they did not need to. Somehow to hear it … seemed demeaning.” Asher, meanwhile, ruminates on “how her shorn hair would feel”.
To be sure, Brooke is not disadvantaged. She is well educated, dearly loved by her adoptive mother (a lawyer dedicated to reproductive justice), bolstered by good friends, a circle of unofficial aunts and a decent salary. That the above points never devolve into cliche is down to Alam’s well-honed instinct to endow Brooke with a selfishness that could give any Ottessa Moshfegh protagonist a run for her money – a statement issued here with sincere admiration. For, if Asher – whose foundation is nothing more than an elaborate tax break, whose office is hung with pictures of himself with Henry Kissinger and Bill Cosby – is an image of the American dream gone wrong, then so is she. Community is a concept lost on Brooke. Instead, her sense of herself as a good person is determined by proximity to and desire for “Asher’s money”. Though tasked with finding a project worthy of endowment, any acts of service she performs go towards either Asher or herself and only tangentially to an already self-sufficient Brooklyn community school, whose “Black kids with Black problems” she designates symbolically stirring enough for the magnate’s chequebook.
Before long, we find Brooke neglecting, even hurting, friends and family in favour of chauffeured drives to expensive lunches with Asher, spending sprees on the company card, and the pursuit of an apartment she cannot afford. Such behaviour, of course, is bound to end badly. Indeed, the culmination of Entitlement’s plot rests on an exquisitely ugly case of mistaken identity. Much of the fun after reading lies in teasing out how much of Alam’s excoriating gaze is aimed at his characters, and how much at the structural inadequacies of a nation that institutes private wealth as a means of survival. How culpable, in other words, can we find Brooke? A less daring book might say, not at all.
For all this, it bears pointing out that there is something slightly fatiguing about her ill-advised behaviour in the workplace. This is a charge better laid at publishing’s door than Alam’s. Between Raven Leilani’s Luster in 2020 and RF Kuang’s Yellowface in 2023, some of our decade’s most successful novels so far seem marked by female protagonists who fail to perform their jobs with ordinary common sense. It is possible to reason that the numerous HR violations such characters commit (slash, are driven to) are a rebuttal to the socially isolating and economically impoverishing effects of neoliberal capitalism. Brooke’s defence for defrauding the Jaffee Foundation reads as more or less that “If she couldn’t be rich, she could at least possess some of what rich people did. To participate in this would get her nearer to the apartment … didn’t Brooke deserve something too?” But I do wonder whether acquisition teams might stop to consider the aggregate effect of decrying the ethics of neoliberalism by generating a trend of fictional women who professionally self-harm.
There is no reason, however, to hold this against Entitlement too strongly. Alam’s writing is never more brilliant than when it ridicules corporate America. “Men in business casual” swarm, “common as pigeons”. While Brooke argues the importance of the arts in children’s education to Asher, he listens seriously, for “just as he’d not thought about the rights of gays to marry one another until last year, he’d never before considered the question of finger paint”. Such wryness serves Entitlement well, solidifying it as the sort of shrewd, propulsive read the word “zeitgeisty” ought to be reserved for.
• Entitlement by Rumaan Alam is published by Bloomsbury (£16.99). To support the Guardian and the Observer, buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
