Is there anyone more pitiable than a middle-class Manhattanite? Rumaan Alam’s novel Entitlement opens 12 years ago, during, as the author acidly puts it, “the good luck of a boring moment in the world’s long history, Obama’s placid America”. Its bourgeois heroine, Brooke, is “young, elegant, powerful,” the protege of a philanthropist billionaire. Things for her do not bode well, for this is a social satire, wherein the protagonist almost always gets the most dramatic downfall.
Alam is scathingly funny. Describing one character, he writes, “[her] conversation was endless query, like a television host. It was meant as a kindness”. His novel exists in a rarefied realm, where parents cosign their adult children’s leases, and a black girl can major in art history. Still, stakes are high. Adopted by a white, lawyer mother, Brooke’s Blackness can be an irritation, like being mistaken as a waitress, but also an advantage, as in her relationship with her employer. “Brooke knew Asher wouldn’t want Puerto Rican kids being subjected to iambic pentameter or some fourth graders who spoke Cantonese at home learning the violin ... He’d want the story of Black kids with Black problems.” More menacing than race is wealth, for although Virginia Woolf asserts that every creative woman requires a room of her own, financially naive Brooke cannot afford the downpayment on a modest Manhattan one-bed. Her closest friendships are corroded by economic disparities. Brooke’s boss gives $10,000 to an underprivileged girls’ dancing school while dropping $875,000 on a painting he dislikes.
Entitlement invites comparison to Edith Wharton’s House of Mirth and Sylvia Plath’s Bell Jar. These coming-of-age fables, set in New York a decade previous to their publication, open with their heroines juxtaposed with Manhattan’s most enduring mode of transport, the train. Wharton’s Lily rushes to catch the Hudson Line, Brooke is delayed on the 6 Local, and Plath’s Esther inhales the subway’s “peanut smell”. (Assam closes his acknowledgments with “apologies to Sylvia Plath”, as Entitlement’s first sentence echoes hers.) Unlike her predecessors, Brooke is not expected to marry; instead, the virtue at risk is her integrity. “I spend a small fortune at Vassar,” her mother mourns, “and she’s a secretary to some zillionaire.”
Poised between the disaster of 9/11 and the strangeness that is now, Enlightenment’s idealism is, like Brooke, doomed. As I lived crosstown from where Brooke worked, I wondered how Entitlement would resonate with readers unfamiliar with its world. However, books of this calibre transcend personal experience. I barrelled through the novel – propelled by its wit and unshakeable dread – and promptly read it again. Only then could I luxuriate in its tautness. Mundane conversations distil into dazzling singsong, characters’ internal musings dart and flicker, and the whole is expertly held together by its narrator’s sly interjections. Its stylishness belies discipline, for not a word is wasted. Like New York, Entitlement will linger despite its apparent, cavalier air.
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Mei Chin is a critic
