You Can’t Take It With You?

Julia Berick reviews “Entitlement,” the fourth novel from Rumaan Alam.

By Julia BerickSeptember 17, 2024

• Fiction

VIEWS, DRINKS, lavish interiors—whether Rumaan Alam’s new novel Entitlement tracks like a critique or like a theme park ride is in the inclination of the reader. But there is a lesson should you choose to take a kale chip with your martini, and the closer you read, the larger and thornier it appears.

It could be fairly simple to glide over the surface of Alam’s story. The women—the book is populated mostly by women—are all beautiful, perfectly outfitted and groomed. There is one woman who is a little drunk but she looks alright. There is one woman who is “pink” and not alright, but she is rude and that is the point. These women eat delicious, meticulous meals and drink expensive wine. Their homes are equipped with breathtaking artwork and even more stunning views. Everyone has attentive staff of some kind or another. In Entitlement, as in Forster, “we are not concerned with the very poor. They are unthinkable, and only to be approached by the statistician or the poet.”

Brief interludes with underprivileged youth in drum circles aside, the novel follows 33-year-old Brooke Orr through her wildly vertiginous first months working at the private family foundation of Asher Jaffee in New York City. It’s the summer of 2016, the last days of the Obama-era oblivion. Despite how closely you ride behind Brooke’s elegant shoulder, she is hard to know, and remains, to the last, undecided about her preference for being seen or being invisible. Early in the book, Brooke steps into her family home unheeded and hears her mother expressing disappointment and disdain for Brooke’s choices—a signal that even in her own house, Brooke’s presence is unstable.

Brooke is a Black woman who, as a baby, was adopted and raised by a single white woman who lives very comfortably but, vitally, is not wealthy “by New York standards.” The mother, a lawyer at the helm of a reproductive justice nonprofit, also adopted a white boy, for whom she harbors less complicated pride. The pathos in this, the mother’s unconscious bias between the siblings, could be beyond painful. Yet Brooke seems to take it on its face and, as her ambitions grow, seems to settle for financial equity in her family if she can’t have other kinds. All of this could be a depthless backstory, pushing Brooke into the arms of other parent figures or out of her mind—and maybe it does.

If Brooke’s race disadvantages her in her family, it might have the opposite effect at work. Despite initially nettling the billionaire donor, Jaffee, Brooke rather suddenly wins his favor. And he brings her to the fore of his efforts to redistribute the bulk of his wealth before he dies. Is it maybe because of her early insouciance? Or is it that she is beautiful, or that she is bright? Or that she is all of this and Black and he likes the way that would look high up in his charitable foundation? You are meant to know her race plays a role in Jaffee’s interest in her, and understanding what that role is becomes a central tension in the novel. Their relationship builds in a nauseous upswell. It is impossible not to be nervous for Brooke as she accompanies Jaffee to more meetings and more meals. They drive in his Bentley and, together, ignore his Black driver. They sit at the table he always has waiting at Jean-Georges. They stop by Christie’s and contemplate a purchase. Something very bad is going to happen and you want to warn her. As the story draws on the devices of horror, her friends do warn her, but she dismisses first their opinions and then their friendship, as she does with her family and her “aunties.”

Alam constructs several anticlimaxes in which the worst seems inevitable and yet fails to occur. Brooke and Jaffee drink too much and then go to his apartment, from which she emerges unscathed—unless she doesn’t. Many of these anticlimaxes build (how could they not) on the kinds of nightmares white Americans are barely, if at all, alive to: that just being Black in a variety of places and scenarios can be dangerous. Alam, who was born to Bangladeshi parents in Washington, DC, and has two Black adopted children of his own, is perhaps probing the depths of late-night personal panics along with the terrors of the headlines. That the story’s end is left somewhat open to interpretation is perhaps born from an equal and opposite optimism—although it could just be a teasing way to face the reader with a Rorschach test, a device the author seems to favor.

It may also be Alam’s particular pet to haunt more with emotional vacancy than with big emotional maelstroms. A reader new to Alam’s oeuvre could be forgiven for thinking that some of the uses of this trope are a bit laconic. For instance, the death of one of Brooke’s beloved aunties isn’t even an inconvenience. She skips grief and the memorial, taking the death instead as another argument for her increasing focus: securing a small amount of wealth, property, power to call her own. Auntie Paige dies in the suburbs, where she had been banished due to financial hardship: “Paige, who had danced with Albert of Monaco and dined with Karl Lagerfeld, took a job manning the telephones at an orthodontics practice in a Rockville Centre strip mall. She rented a room in an exurban town house that belonged to a flight attendant named Mark.”

There, on the roadside, at a bus stop, Paige is hit by a car. Yet to Brooke, and to the rest of the women in her life, Auntie Paige is killed not by a car but by poverty. And because Paige is such an insubstantial character, it is hard to disagree. Real people of every economic bracket are killed by automobiles all the time, but Paige doesn’t seem quite real, which makes the point tricky. Is Paige deliberately thin so that the reader reacts like Brooke does—and is thereby implicated in her superficiality? If so, might it have been more impactful to make Paige compelling so that the reader can see instead the difference between an appropriate reaction and Brooke’s?

Jaffee’s daughter is also dead, killed “at her desk at Cantor Fitzgerald” in the 9/11 attacks. Possibly, the two deaths are meant to be taken together, to show that money doesn’t protect us; after all, “you can’t take it with you.” There is a reference to the Kaufman and Hart play of that name in Entitlement, one of many clues that, however he intended it to be read, Alam clearly had a very good time writing. This is either the brilliance or the frustration of Alam’s novel: the degree to which you can detect his hand on the ropes and his finger on the scale.

Early in the story, Brooke makes a purchase on Amazon. Planning to expense one item on the receipt, she considers how easy it would be to have the others covered as well. On the list are sundry household items and Tom Wolfe’s doorstop, The Bonfire of the Vanities (1987). It’s a hint, about how we are meant to take Alam’s tale. For one, Brooke starts off moral. For another, the pulpy, pointed incitement of 1980s greed and megalomania is a chaotic but fairly straightforward parable: money corrupts and the only Master of the Universe is almighty.

Accordingly, Brooke, who begins her tenure at the foundation meticulous in her reimbursements, soon falls completely under the spell of Jaffee’s billions. In a nettling complication, Jaffee isn’t easily evil. Neither is his money. He made most of it on office supplies and is now mainly guilty of wanting to get a little recognition from President Obama for giving it all away. He may not be a saintly employer, but he isn’t uniquely evil, either.

If Brooke’s actions are more objectionable, Alam keeps them just around the margins of relatability. The evidence that she is wandering off the rails is subtle and hinges on understanding the difference between shopping a sales rack at Barneys with an auntie and shopping uninhibited and solo at Saks. Or comprehending that in the summer of 2016, the cost of a wedding in Manhattan was about equivalent to the cost of a down payment on a one-bedroom in the territory between Gramercy and Kips Bay. Though these are niche details, the context of which is already shifting, the novel is strong here. Some of Brooke’s desires will be recognizable to everyone—she wants respect, agency—but her particular sublimations seem very specific. Brooke doesn’t wish to see herself defined by a great love, by a family, or even by a career. As she grows closer to Jaffee’s wealth and power, as her peers make other moves toward adulthood, she settles on keys to a one-bedroom, a tiny space of one’s own. “[T]his apartment,” writes Alam, “would make Brooke the person she meant to be.” He doesn’t say why, exactly. The details of the apartment itself are spare (you are told just that the view is a view of a Manhattan jigsaw). But the arbitrariness works.

There is something particularly relatable about Brooke’s desperate reach for some one thing that will help her feel realized. This spasm will be deeply present to those who, like Brooke, have worked in nonprofits in Manhattan, Los Angeles, Boston, Chicago, San Francisco. They, like Brooke, have watched donated sums sail past that are so many times the salary of the personnel processing the check that reality warps and wobbles and it can be hard to step off the ride. For whom is the funhouse fun? For billionaires, perhaps.