Wrong answer

When your previous book was a bestseller (and Barack Obama summer reading pick), made into a movie starring Julia Roberts, as was Rumaan Alam’s Leave the World Behind (TLS, December 18, 2020), the temptation to extract a formula – apocalyptic disaster? How privileged people deal with apocalyptic disaster? – must be strong. Alam has instead retrenched. There are no inexplicable migrations, shattering sonic booms or deforming diseases in Entitlement, his fourth novel. Instead the author harks back to the everyday realism of his first and second novels, tracking closely the triumphs and tribulations of a young woman navigating racial and patriarchal obstacles in New York City. In an era of merger-made publishers hot for brands, sequels and series, this is an act of courage. With his slow-building drama and carefully drawn characters, Alam makes clear he is writing fiction rather than creating content.

Brooke Orr, Entitlement’s protagonist, from whose perspective the story is primarily told, is a thirty-three-year-old Black woman who has landed a job at a well-funded foundation following nearly a decade as a public school teacher in the Bronx. It is 2014, Obama is in the White House and someone riding the subways is stealthily pricking women with hypodermic needles (as happened in 2016). Alam makes much of the subway situation and more of Brooke’s Blackness, as when a pricker-delayed train makes her late for a meeting, her embarrassment hidden because “white people – and her office was all white people – could never quite tell when a Black person was flushed”. The insensitivities and insufficiencies of the white world add up (a “master” bedroom is renamed “primary” to avoid “accidental overtones of slavery”; a wealthy hostess at a foundation party mistakes Brooke for staff), finally driving our protagonist to the rash act that precipitates an overdue reckoning with her billionaire boss, the octogenarian Asher Jaffee.

Artfully, Alam presents Brooke as neither a victim nor a do-gooder, making her instead more selfish than selfless, more prickly than pricked. Her backstory as an orphan adopted by a progressive white woman who regards Asher as another wealthy tax scammer, together with the instances of subtle and outright racism to which Brooke is subjected, evoke sympathy that could easily veer into sentimentality. Alam puts a check on and eventually upends such expectations, opting for complexity rather than easy appeal. Brooke turns out to be selfish and cruel, mocking her wealthy best friend’s frivolous career choice, missing her mother’s best friend’s memorial service to indulge an Asher Jaffee whim and using her corporate credit card to buy a bag full of fancy clothes. As her transgressions multiply she comes to seem as ethically challenged as her boss. Determined to buy an apartment of her own, she fabricates a reference to qualify for a mortgage, quadrupling her salary and forging a signature. With the discovery of the document, the novel’s endgame begins. Our sympathy for Brooke is long gone, but the plot twists finally kicking in to keep the pages turning.

Alam’s suppression of significant suspense until that late moment is Entitlement’s big gambit. In the meantime the deepening relationship between Brooke and her boss must maintain momentum. Alam’s trick here – used to great effect with the six central characters of Leave the World Behind – is his telegraphic narrative style, in which he splices short sentences or fragments into sequences of dialogue to take us into his characters’ alternating points of view, an awareness of underlying intentions heightening tension as Brooke and Asher bat words back and forth. In an early interrogation of his new employee, we track both Asher’s shifting mood (“He was bored”; “He shook his head. Wrong Answer”; “This ambition touched him”) and Brooke’s rapid evaluations and adjustments (“She had an opportunity”; “She wouldn’t be embarrassed by her earnestness”; “She knew that she had done well, that she had aced this test”).

It is almost enough, but in the end Entitlement lacks the velocity of Leave the World Behind. It is a headier book, but a more diffuse one, the scenes spent among family and friends reinforcing our sense of Brooke’s strident individuality, but also creating static stretches, pulling us a few too many times away from the charged interplay between the thirty-three-year-old employee and her eighty-three-year-old boss, with its forceful undercurrent of abusive power dynamics.

Mark Kamine is an executive producer of The White Lotus. His memoir, On Locations, which concerns starting out in the film business, appeared this year

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