From An American Tragedy to The Talented Mr. Ripley, literature is filled with lower-class protagonists who love their first taste of the high life and will employ just about any ruse to acquire more. Scooch over, Clyde Griffiths and Tom Ripley, and make room for Conor O'Toole, the protagonist of The Winner, Teddy Wayne's venomous novel about the zero-point-one percent and their discontents. It's 2020, Covid-19 is surging, and Conor, a recent graduate of a less-than-prestigious law school, lives in Yonkers with his mother, whose insulin payments add to his burden of $144,000 in student loans. Fortunately, he's also a tennis instructor. A member of an Upper East Side tennis club, a lawyer riding out the pandemic at Cutters Neck, a gated community on a "two-mile pinkie of land jutting from the southern shores of Massachusetts," arranges to put Conor up at his waterfront guesthouse for the summer. In exchange, Conor gives expensive tennis lessons to affluent residents.
It's a nice gig, until a middle-aged divorcée starved for sex offers Conor double his rate for extracurricular instruction considerably more carnal than cross-court winners. In entertainingly vicious scenes, Wayne (The Great Man Theory) describes the complications she introduces, complications that become more fraught when Conor begins a relationship with a wealthy Brooklynite closer to his own age. The Winner isn't as nuanced as similar novels, but readers who want a light read and enjoy seeing bad people get their comeuppance will find many scoundrels to root against in this ferocious book. --Michael Magras, freelance book reviewer