Rumaan Alam (That Kind of Mother; Leave the World Behind) offers a slow-burning, insidiously creepy study of money and culture in his quietly distressing novel Entitlement.
Native Manhattanite Brooke, at 33, feels hopeful about her new job at a charitable foundation. She's not professionally ambitious so much as she yearns for a little more than she has. The new job is initially just that--until she forms a special bond with the octogenarian billionaire, the famously self-made Asher Jaffee, whose money she disburses. Brooke embraces his advice to "Demand something from the world. Demand the best. Demand it." As she sinks into the sumptuous life Asher invites her into, Brooke becomes increasingly confident in the demands she makes of the world, sure that she is doing good and doing well. With Alam's signature tone of building foreboding, however, the reader becomes less and less sure.
Money is at the heart of Entitlement: what money can and cannot buy; how to give away Asher's; where Brooke can find more for herself. Her financial status is, if not perfectly secure, not uncomfortable. Meanwhile, race is a more understated part of her story. Brooke, a Black woman with a white mother and a white brother (she's adopted), "spent most of her time with white people, who never discussed the allegiance of race, because they did not need to."
Alam is ever adept and incisive with the subtle examination of interpersonal as well as systemic issues: race, class, ambition, avarice. Entitlement provides a deceptively silky backdrop for the kinds of thrillingly uncomfortable questions at which Alam excels. --Julia Kastner, librarian and blogger at pagesofjulia