Rumaan Alam’s first novel since his lockdown breakout hit, Leave the World Behind, takes some risks in the opening pages. He begins (“It was a strange, sultry summer … ”) by paraphrasing Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, inviting comparison with a classic before he’s even begun. Then he tells us that, in 2014 when the story is set, the news was dominated by an anonymous man on the New York underground who injects women with a syringe. But the name Alam chooses for the attacker – the Subway Pricker – is irretrievably comic, at least to British ears, and it sets the off-kilter tone for this curious book.
At the centre is Brooke, a 33-year-old Black woman who’s drifting in life until she encounters the 83-year-old billionaire Asher Jaffee, who takes her on as an assistant and adviser to help him distribute his money to good causes in the community. He wants “to give it all away – to feel good, no, to be good”. Asher’s wealth may be in another league, but most of the key characters in the book are, if not stinking rich, at least a bit whiffy, and comfortable with that – hence the title. Early on we encounter “a plastic surgeon so successful that he owned polo horses”, Brooke’s aunt Paige, who had “danced with Albert of Monaco and dined with Karl Lagerfeld”, and her friend Kim, who “had long known she would come into a sum you could only call vast”, and who buys an apartment with a $4,000 a month service charge.
Surrounded by all this, Brooke wonders why she doesn’t have this sort of money – and how she might go about getting it. Asher gives her a big cheque – “It’s a gesture. Enjoy it. Indulge me” – which she initially rejects, but then pockets. From here on, her price determined, it’s downhill all the way for Brooke – or uphill, depending on how you look at it. She absorbs Asher’s belief systems: “Instead of virtue or sin, there was gain or loss.” She starts to wonder whether $2m is really all that much for an apartment, and skips a relative’s memorial service – “she felt nothing at all” when she heard of the death – to continue working with Asher.
To summarise the book thus, however, gives no impression of the experience of actually reading it. Leave the World Behind had an inbuilt tension to the narrative, but here the story meanders for most of its length in no particular hurry. One subplot, where a community school repeatedly refuses Asher’s money, drags on beyond plausibility: why didn’t Brooke and Asher just look for another recipient?
Worse than this are the bum notes in the bizarre narrative style Alam has chosen. This is marked by switching between characters’ viewpoints, the problem being that when two people meet, and we can see what they’re both thinking, any tension dissolves. Further, Alam has a gift for what we might call le mot faux, stopping the reader short mid-sentence. He says “advocate for the devil” instead of devil’s advocate. And if we’re already unsure whether the Subway Pricker is supposed to be threatening or silly, telling us that he’s “poking into strange women” doesn’t help.
Other descriptions are either weirdly tin-eared – violence is “inside everyone” (OK) “like microplastics” (what?) – or hopelessly vague: “He was handsome in that way bartenders tended to be.” The cadence Alam favours throughout, of a solemn omniscience (“Her smile was like the Virgin Mary’s, subdued and private”), is particularly discordant when describing sex. “It took longer than expected, his focus not flagging even once he’d ejaculated, politely on to himself instead of her bed.” What I was repeatedly reminded of was the mandarin style of the late James Salter, but without that great writer’s ear and rhythm – not to say the pains he took to stay just on the right side of ridiculous.
The interesting elements of Entitlement – the investigation of the corrupting influence of money, the exploration of the imbalance between what we need, what we want and what we deserve – are buried beneath these distracting details. In the very final stretches, we get some narrative force at last, and a reckoning for the central characters. It comes as a relief, but not a redemption.
Entitlement by Rumaan Alam is published by Bloomsbury (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
