Rumaan Alam on Creating a Fictional World of the One Percent

Rumaan Alam’s captivating, artfully nuanced fourth novel, Entitlement, revolves around the growing distance between the one percent and the rest of us. He features Brooke Orr, a Black woman who has left her teaching job at a Bronx charter school in 2014 to work for a nonprofit, helping Asher Jaffee, a self-made multibillionaire, give away his money. Her assumption is, she will be doing good. As she bounces between gritty subway stations and Bed-Stuy bars with friends, and concerts at Lincoln Center and dinners at Jean-Georges with Asher, Brooke is gradually seduced by the beyond-aspirational privilege of the super wealthy. Asher becomes her mentor, and she begins to fantasize about what he could give her, how little it would take to change her life upward. “Demand something from the world,” Asher instructs her. “Demand the best. Demand it.” Living on the fringe of Asher’s life gradually destabilizes Brooke (one longtime friend sees a newfound conviction in her eyes—or is it madness?). Then Alam ratchets up the stakes, building to a gripping, frenetic, revelatory finale. Our Brooklyn/Sonoma County email conversation took place during the last days of summer.

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Jane Ciabattari: How have these recent years of pandemic and conflict affected your life, your family, your work, including the Netflix film Leave the World Behind, which premiered in December 2023 (and in which your family played a cameo), and the writing of and launch of your new novel, Entitlement?

Rumaan Alam: Well, the period of the pandemic was so difficult for so many my complaints about managing grade school on Zoom seem silly. Our family weathered that time happily enough, or the stresses and fears are largely forgotten, and now, in the way of recent history, those feelings seem distant. Similarly, the oddity of the film adaptation of Leave the World Behind feels removed from my current reality—something fun and interesting that happened to me once, a great story to tell at a party, a couple of names I’m now equipped to drop. The months I spent writing and revising Entitlement were their own challenge, I guess; writing a novel tends to feel like an uphill slog to me. But by the time the book’s publication rolls around I mostly forget that. It must be some psychic defense mechanism.

JC: What drew you to write about an ambitious young Black woman in the highly funded universe of nonprofit foundations, where billionaires, in this case self-made Asher Jaffee, maneuver the game of giving away money for tax credits and influence? What inspired Entitlement?

RA: I wish I could pinpoint the genesis of this novel, or any project I undertake; perhaps then I’d be better able to jumpstart that process, and leap into a new manuscript or something. I think it’s more a matter of accrual over time. I’m not sure what I was thinking, really, whenever this book was first a spark in my brain, but I know that early on I had the idea of a novel about a woman who marries an apartment. Not literally, of course, but a woman choosing to buy real estate over settling down with a romantic partner. There is a ghost of that idea in Entitlement, but the book grew to be about a lot of other things I was thinking about: the nonprofit sector and philanthropy, the contrast between the comfortably middle class and the one percent, life in a pre-pandemic New York.

JC: How did you develop the character of Brooke Orr? Does she resemble anyone who is “real”?

RA: I’m not sure she resembles anyone real. I’m not all that sure the reader—indeed even I as the author—see her wholly, but then maybe we rarely do see people in full, even in reality. So maybe that makes Brooke as real as anyone else we encounter, in life or in fiction. She’s a mystery. She’s certainly not based on anyone, or at least as far as I’m aware. When my husband read this book he had the same reaction he’s had after reading my previous books, pointing out that the protagonist, indeed almost everyone on the page, is some version of me. Maybe he’s right.

JC: Your opening line places 33-year-old Brooke on the subway on her way to work: “It was a strange sultry summer, the summer of the Subway Pricker, but Brooke Orr had decided not to let that interfere with the business of life in New York.” We see her in the bustle and clatter of the subway, and imagine for the first time this strange attacker who threads through the rest of the novel with his “innocent” “timid violation.” This first time we meet him, his attack causes a delay that makes Brooke late to work in Asher Jaffee’s foundation office on West 36th Street, her first meeting with her new boss. Where did he come from? (And, no spoilers, yes, this line is like Chekhov’s gun on the wall.)

RA: The first lines of Entitlement are stolen from Sylvia Plath, whose sole novel has a truly arresting first line that I had to paraphrase because she uses the word queer instead of strange, a better word, for sure, but one with too specific a connotation for modern readers. (I apologized to Plath in the book’s acknowledgments; I hope for her forgiveness.) The Bell Jar was a touchstone for a lot of reasons that I will let readers discover for themselves. The Subway Pricker is a figure who haunts this book, I’m not sure why—maybe because I had a sense that it was a story that needed a specter.

JC: What sort of research was involved in building Brooke’s world?

RA: A couple of summers ago, I had a long conversation with a woman I met at a pool party who works as a consultant for nonprofits. I didn’t take notes but I did remember our chat; that’s the kind of research I enjoy. This novel didn’t require me to settle into a library for days at a time but to do the kind of noodling on the internet most of us do. I had to check the auction records for paintings by Frankenthaler and Monet; I had to look at photos of the dining room at Jean-Georges; I had to remind myself what Barneys looked like; I had to figure out where Madonna’s Manhattan townhouse is. The most fun research I did was studying high end real estate listings to find a home for Asher Jaffee. The house I describe in the book is one that sold in the past couple of years. It is really beautiful.

JC: Brooke thinks of her new job as being about “doing good,” a principal valued by her mother Maggie, a white lawyer who heads an organization dedicated to reproductive justice. But her relationship with Maggie is fraught. Why does Brooke think of herself as a disappointment to Maggie?

RA: Don’t we all feel like disappointments to our parents? Maybe that’s just me. I suppose this is what my husband was getting at, in seeing me in every character.

JC: Brooke meets regularly with her two closest friends, Kim, and Matthew, former classmates at Vassar, where they once gathered in the one Poughkeepsie diner where “two and a half Black people could congregate unmolested.” Over time, Brooke’s new job, and her newfound sense of entitlement, lead to an estrangement. How do you explain this dynamic?

RA: Adulthood and its inherent changes and transitions can cause friendships to fray, intimacies to weaken (or deepen!). This seems to me a familiar dynamic; it’s what my first novel is about. I was interested in this kind of strain being precipitated by a job, by a reordering of professional priorities. I think this is something that happens in real life, why not in a book?

JC: Asher Jaffee, now eighty-three, is drawn to Brooke. He takes her to lunch, begins to mentor her. As Brooke sinks deeper into his world, using his drivers, charging new clothes, taking meetings about giving away his money, she begins to fantasize about what he could give her—an apartment, her own perfect place. Her access to the idea of unlimited cash inflates her sense of self, changes her personality and her values. Is there a name for this? Is she going crazy?

RA: I think the name for this is in fact sanity. The fact of obscene wealth, and the disparity in wealth so prevalent in this country and the world over, should in fact make more of us crazy.

JC: There are moments throughout the novel when you shift from Brooke’s point of view to another’s. Kim, Asher, and others. Was that fluidity of perspective there from the beginning of your work on the manuscript? Where did it come from?

RA: This is a strategy I used in my previous book. It’s hardly new, a novel told from an almost divine perspective, the author a kind of god able to peer into the minds of whomever the book demands, but it is perhaps out of fashion. I find it very liberating; it makes the book much easier to handle, and I’m just lazy enough to want the book I’m writing to be as easy as possible for me.

JC: I’m curious about what you’re working on now/next, especially after reading your post on X a few weeks back: “Told my editor about my new book today, felt exactly like when my children tell me long-winded stories that are mostly made up.”

RA: Oh I just worked up the courage to tell my editor about my next book—I’m hardly ready to tell anyone else! I’m habituated, after years of going to school, to feeling industrious once Labor Day has passed. So I’ll disappear into the writing of that soon. I should be ready to talk about it in two years or so, fingers crossed.

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Entitlement by Rumaan Alam is available from Riverhead Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC.