A billionaire gives away his fortune in Rumaan Alam’s ‘Entitlement’

SCOTT SIMON, HOST:

The megarich, a character in Rumaan Alam’s new novel declares, wreak havoc on the environment and refuse to pay fair taxes. Then they get to decide what’s a worthy cause, bless the rest of us with some of their leftover money.

“Entitlement” centers on Brooke, a former teacher who goes to work for an 83-year-old billionaire to help him decide how to give away his fortune. Brooke begins to try to create her own position in a world she travels without always feeling a part of it. Rumaan Alam, whose “Leave The World Behind” was a 2020 National Book Award finalist, joins us now from our studios in New York. Thanks so much for being with us.

RUMAAN ALAM: Thank you for having me.

SIMON: Please tell us about Brooke, and where she is in her life when she takes this job with the billionaire Asher Jaffee.

ALAM: Brooke is a 33-year-old woman. In the modern world, that sort of counts as young. She’s on the precipice of real adulthood, and she’s sort of in search of who she really is. She finds this job working for Asher Jaffee, a billionaire who intends to give away his fortune, and she thinks that that work may provide her a sense of self.

SIMON: Yeah. All the worthy people and causes the foundation might give money to – appeals come rolling in. Could I ask you to read one from your novel?

ALAM: Absolutely.

(Reading) Brooke would not have guessed that there were people with an enthusiasm bordering on mania for the humble oyster. The group’s fervor was persuasive. The aim was to repatriate the oyster to New York Harbor. This would clean the waterways. This would repair a broken food chain. Beavers would return. You couldn’t be alive in 2014 and not know that the Earth was broken, but it was exhilarating to learn that it could be healed. What was needed was time, and oysters – and millions of dollars.

SIMON: And tell us about Asher Jaffee, because as billionaires go, he seems to wear his heart on his sleeve, doesn’t he?

ALAM: It was my interest in making Asher different than, maybe, the idea of the nefarious billionaire. He made his fortune selling office supplies, which is quite different from being a defense contractor. He is what we call a self-made man, although I’m not really sure that it’s possible for anyone to be self-made.

SIMON: Yeah.

ALAM: And he’s very likable, and he enjoys the great fortune that he’s amassed. I wanted him to feel as seductive to the reader as he proves to be for Brooke.

SIMON: And he wants to do some good, right?

ALAM: I do think that Asher’s motive is sincere. He says, at one point, he wants to do it all. He wants to ban the bomb. He wants to save the whales. He wants to make sure every child in America knows how to read. He cares about these things, and I care about those things, too, and so it was a pleasure to conjure somebody with the kind of political ideals that I share.

SIMON: Yeah. I want you to talk about an extraordinary scene, where Asher casually takes Brooke to see a work of art at an auction house.

ALAM: Asher has gone on this errand to buy a present for his wife for her birthday, and they go into a room and look at a painting by Helen Frankenthaler. And Asher, for all of his fortune, all of his sophistication, feels that this sort of abstract painting is a test, is a referendum on his own sophistication, on his own intellect. Brooke has a different kind of experience in which she really sees something in this painting. She sees something sort of soulful and spiritual, and that is something that Asher, for all of his money, somehow cannot quite possess.

SIMON: Does her work begin to affect Brooke’s plans in life and, if I might put it this way, her objects of desire?

ALAM: Brooke’s proximity to wealth on the scale that belongs to Asher Jaffee distorts her sense of who she is and, with it, everything else – her sense of personal priority, her sense of professional ambition, her sense of ethics and morals. And that is really what the book is asking us, I think, is, what effect does money have on us? And you don’t have to have billions of dollars to acknowledge that money has had an effect on your own life, on the shape of your life and, in fact, on your day-to-day interactions.

SIMON: Somebody told me years ago, in fact, when I was in our New York bureau, that every New York story is ultimately about real estate.

ALAM: (Laughter).

SIMON: Is that true here, too?

ALAM: Real estate is at the heart of the foundational American myth. Even the notion of America’s westward expansion in some way seems to be about real estate, about a desire to acquire space. Brooke is part of a generation who are now adults, I should point out, for whom that prospect feels more mythic than ever because of the way the economy functions right now. Is homeownership really within reach of people in their 30s and 40s? I’m not sure I know the answer to that.

SIMON: You and your husband have a couple of sons. Some people complain about young children interfering with their work. I gather you see your children as spurs to your work.

ALAM: I do think there is a way of thinking about creative life and private family life as at odds with one another. And I think that is a myth, as well, and I think it’s one that’s often propagated by men. My children have been such a source of joy and profound happiness for me and have taken me outside of myself in a way that really suited my work. And I found that after I had children, everything that was unimportant to me fell away. What remained was my children, but also my work. It showed me how to prioritize, and I’m really grateful to them for that.

SIMON: I forget what author who said something to the effect, the death of creativity is the pram in the hallway.

ALAM: Right. That’s exactly it. That distills it perfectly. I have a sense that that was said by a man who probably wasn’t out pushing the…

SIMON: Pushing the pram (laughter).

ALAM: In my household, my husband and I have both taken our turns pushing the stroller and now, you know, accompanying our son to hockey practice or whatever. I choose not to see that as an impediment to what I want to accomplish professionally. I prefer to acknowledge it as really enriching something in me.

SIMON: Do you see this country, and maybe even much of this world, as in a kind of new Gilded Age now?

ALAM: I think that I am hardly alone in drawing that particular parallel. We are in a moment where the billionaire as a figure is a celebrity and where we can see all around us the ramifications of this particular stratification of wage in this country. And I do think that we are in a moment of reckoning with that, especially as a generation behind me heads into maturity. The system, I think, cannot persist.

SIMON: Do you think it’s important for novelists to write about this these days?

ALAM: I wouldn’t want to prescribe what it is novelists should be tackling, but I would say that the political is inescapable. It’s part of the air we all breathe. And if you’re writing about real life, if you’re writing about family life, if you’re writing about nature – whatever it is, it’s going to have an element of the political inside of it.

SIMON: Rumaan Alam, his new novel, “Entitlement.” Thank you so much for being with us.

ALAM: Thank you very much.

(SOUNDBITE OF LAURENT DURY AND SEBASTIEN GISBERT’S “EARTH ATMOSPHERE”)

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