“There’s a lot of secret money,” writer Rumaan Alam said in a recent Guardian interview. He refers to “these secret layers of money and pedigree informing other people’s lives. And once you’ve realized that, it can make you crazy with envy, or frustration.” “Entitlement,” Alam’s bleakly satirical, unnerving new novel, shows the devastating impact of that realization on a young New York City woman whose life is derailed by her proximity to a fortune “as mind-boggling as the stars.”

Alam’s previous novel, “Leave the World Behind” (2020), gave readers a glimpse of an indeterminate apocalypse and its impact on two affluent families in the Hamptons, one Black, the other White. A similar sense of dread infuses “Entitlement,” with its steady poisonous drip of racism, generational wealth, classism and real estate envy.

Review

Courtesy of Riverhead

“Entitlement”

By Rumaan Alam

Riverhead. 288 pages

$30

Brooke Orr, the book’s protagonist, is the adopted Black daughter of a well-off, white single mother who runs an organization devoted to reproductive health. Growing up in an affluent liberal bubble in Manhattan, Brooke attended private school and clung to her biracial “almost cousin” and best friend, Kim. Both Brooke and Kim went to Vassar, where they befriended Matthew – “a cliché, two girls and their gay best pal” – and gamed out the best places where “two and a half Black people could congregate unmolested.”

Now it’s 2014. Brooke and her pals are 33 and living in New York. Alam perfectly nails the fleeting optimism of the era; at one point, Brooke pulls out her phone to scan the news, and the headlines are all anodyne – “the good luck of a boring moment in the world’s long history, Obama’s placid America.” Brooke has recently left the Bronx charter school where she taught art for nine years and taken a vaguely defined position at the Asher and Carol Jaffee Foundation, run by a billionaire and his wife. She sees her new job not just as a big step up from teaching, but as a chance to do some serious good.

Asher Jaffee had “made a fortune by diversification,” the narrator explains, and “he would give that fortune away by the same logic. The environment, education, health, the arts, civic engagement, a better society by every measure.”

Brooke’s mother sniffs that her daughter is “a secretary to some zillionaire.” But Brooke is exhilarated to be even a small part of such a virtuous endeavor. “Let this be her purpose. Let her, unnoticed, make the world a better place. Because that was what they were doing, right?”

Yet resentment simmers beneath Brooke’s altruism, especially after Kim inherits a fortune from her long-dead father. Kim, beautiful and now fabulously wealthy, leaves the Brooklyn two-bedroom she and Matthew shared for a decade (another unspoken source of tension for Brooke) and buys a $2 million apartment in the West Village.

“I’m expecting you to be here all the time,” Kim assures her friends. “Like every weekend. Whenever.” All three of them know that won’t happen.

Alam gives a shout-out to Sylvia Plath’s “The Bell Jar” in his novel’s first line: “It was a strange, sultry summer, the summer of the Subway Pricker,” who jabs women passengers with a hypodermic then flees. Very soon, envy lances Brooke like the assailant’s needle. She tells herself “she didn’t want much more than she had,” but the fact of Kim’s inherited wealth gnaws at her like a subway rat. Surely, it’s an injustice that Kim now possesses what Brooke believes is “deeper, more profound” than the American Dream, “a place in the world that was yours alone, that reflected who you were and what you were worth.”

Brooke knows that everything in New York City is both transactional and performative, especially for a young Black woman. Declaring herself to be Jaffee’s protégé, she quickly captivates the old man, whose only daughter died when she was not much older than Brooke. She accompanies him to drinks, dinners at Jean-Georges, an evening at Lincoln Center, a private tour of his Manhattan penthouse pied-à-terre, with its Monet and glass wall overlooking Central Park. She even advises him to spend almost a million dollars on a Helen Frankenthaler painting, a surprise birthday gift for his wife.

“This woman, Brooke, Black, gorgeous, serious, passionate, was the sort of woman he wanted at the foundation,” Jaffee thinks, “the sort of woman he wanted working in his name. It was electric, almost chemical.”

Early on, Brooke grasps that money is Arthur Jaffee’s language. Spending time with him, she believes she’s learning to speak that language fluently, that she lives in the same world he inhabits. She doesn’t grasp that she’s merely an economy-class visitor in hostile territory, and her sudden mania – sparked by a desperate drive for a home of her own – could be her undoing. Yet while Alam captures that obsession, Brooke seems oddly unformed for 33. She shows little curiosity about cultural events in a city teeming with them, and exhibits few emotional or romantic interests, other than an encounter with a hot bartender. This can make the nonstop discussions of money, power and real estate feel more polemical than character-driven.

“Entitlement’s” final chapters move as propulsively as a thriller, but they can be hard to read. Why hasn’t anyone noticed that this gifted young woman is in the throes of a terrifying mental health crisis? Yet unhinged and self-absorbed as she is, Brooke still commands the reader’s sympathy and compassion. “You needed a home to be a person,” Alam writes, “and the world had conspired to make some believe that this was, perhaps, too much to ask.”

Elizabeth Hand’s most recent novel is “A Haunting on the Hill.”