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.
