Rumaan Alam
Entitlement by Rumaan Alam is the story of Brooke, a 33-year-old black woman who quits her career as a teacher and takes a position as an assistant to 83-year-old Asher Jaffee, a billionaire who wants to distribute his money to support causes that make a difference to people’s lives. The novel investigates the corrupting influence of money and explores the issues of race, identity, class, and white privilege.
Asher tasks Brooke with finding some worthwhile community causes that can benefit from an injection of his funds. Brooke embraces the task with relish. Her research leads her to a community school that teaches dance to inner city school children. Much to her surprise, she has an uphill battle to convince the school to accept Asher’s money. Meanwhile, Asher has taken in interest in Brooke. He calls her his protégé. He exposes her to his exorbitantly affluent lifestyle, taking her all over town in his chauffeur-driven Bentley to eat in expensive restaurants, attend meetings with foundations soliciting his funds, and show off his home away from home New York apartment.
When Asher drops several hundred thousand dollars to purchase a painting for his wife’s birthday on Brooke’s advice, Brooke becomes heady with the seeming power she yields over him. She goes down the precipitous path of feeling she is entitled to some of Asher’s money. She purchases expensive clothes and charges it to the foundation. She sets her heart on an apartment and forges a signature to exaggerate her salary for a mortgage application. She becomes alienated from family and from friends she has known since childhood. She skips a close relative’s memorial service without remorse.
From an idealist who wants to do good into someone who is willing to lie, cheat, and abandon friends and family in pursuit of a life-style she can ill afford, Brooke’s transformation is complete. She feels entitled to Asher’s money, convincing herself that he wouldn’t even feel its absence if he bought her an apartment. Her proposition to Asher at the end of the book shows just how far she has fallen. Her exposure to so much wealth seduces her into believing she is entitled to a share of it, confusing what she wants with what she must have and what she thinks she deserves. As her wealthy billionaire mentor, Asher is partly responsible for her downfall because he is oblivious to the impact exposure to so much wealth can have on an impressionable young woman.
Alam’s style of writing is jarring with choppy sentences, fragments, and unsettling shifts in perspectives. A shortcoming of the book is its portrayal of characters, which are flat and border on caricature. They are not well-rounded and come across as mouthpieces for articulating platitudes. Brooke is in an ideal position to critique the social implications of so much wealth and the motives behind affluent liberalism. But she fails to do so. Instead, she gets sucked into the maelstrom of wanting more for herself. Although her interiority and transformation are not convincing, the novel is to be commended for its exploration of the potentially corrupting influence of excessive wealth.