I may have failed to understand this book.

Maybe there is something I overlooked. Maybe I misunderstood? It comes across as a 33 year old New Yorker, Brooke Orr, who has every advantage, education in Vassar College – which is brought up many times – as a art history major, a good job at a Foundation for the philanthropy of billionaire Asher Jaffee, a loving adopted mother and adopted brother, her youth, health, beauty, and two extremely close friends from Vassar, her complete freedom – and yet who is a petty, vengeful, dissatisfied and utterly selfish person who deems she ‘deserves’ – no logic as to why – so much more, that she deserves the lifestyle and wealth of the billionaires she has caught a glimpse of, by working closely with Jaffee himself. Why we should care for such a protagonist is beyond me.

Brooke makes an impression on the 83 year old billionaire Jaffee, who treats her as his protégé. It is well to make clear that this is not a novel about a rich, old white rich man who is sleeping with a beautiful, ambitious, young black woman. There is no sexual relationship between Brooke and Jaffee. However, the power differential makes the relationship an uncomfortable one nevertheless, and perhaps not always appropriate, even if it has no sexual basis. Brooke does not seem to see her situation is compromising and precarious. She feels the ambiguity:

It remained unclear what she might demand. Could a protégé insist upon an explanation or did she obey without question?” (p123).

However, she never dares push or question in case she jeopardises what she sees as her privileged position perched beside Jaffee.

Jaffee’s foundation is giving away a million dollars to an oyster project to clean up the waters, and Brooke has been asked to find other good projects for Jaffee to donate to. She hooks Jaffee’s interest by telling him to save souls, through art and community, and comes across the Throop Community School which seems to her perfect to be a beneficiary. Her job is to broker the transaction, first get Throop School to be on board, then get Jaffee to agree to donate to this cause. She is baffled when their founder does not take the bait.

Brooke did not understand how these people could not want Asher’s money” (p119)

By contrast, Brooke says,

‘I can’t stop myself wanting things.’ She saw this as the fundamental part of being alive” (p253).

In one of their early encounters, Jaffee already seems to be coaching Brooke to think differently:

“Demand something from the world. Demand the best. Demand it” (p52).

Brooke tries to convey this lesson to her good friend, Matthew:

Once you know it, once you see it, you feel like – why don’t I want more? Why shouldn’t I? And there’s no answer. If someone can be allowed to have all that, why can’t we be allowed to have something so much smaller?” (p198)

Brooke seems to have imbibed Jaffee’s teaching and misapplied it to her own life. She wants to buy an apartment on Twenty-ninth Street far out of her budget, and instead of planning how to secure funds for this, she decides to go on a spending spree:

Perhaps what she needed was to get rid of it all; perhaps then the salvation she believed in would arrive. It was American. If she couldn’t be rich, she could at least possess some of what rich people did. To participate in this would get her nearer to that apartment. Or it was patriotic” (p168).

The salvation mentioned, is probably that Brooke secretly hopes all along, that Jaffee would buy her the apartment.

Brooke commits fraud by using Jaffee’s money for her own expenses and inflating her salary when she puts in for a loan to buy an apartment. When the financing company phones to tell Brooke she has not provided enough evidence for a loan of the size she is asking to buy the apartment she has set her mind on, Brooke rants:

‘I’m a good person. That’s the answer, one answer, to a question that no one is asking because it is relevant.’ She demanded it. A better way. A bit of grace. Dispensation. She deserved it, but that doesn’t matter, either. Brooke demanded it!” (p250)

It is never clear why Brooke thinks she should not be subject to the same rules as everyone else, and why she deserves special treatment or dispensation.

Brooke does not recognise the sorority of black women, or indeed, of any black people, unless it is to her advantage, and then she plays the race card. Alissa, whom Brooke meets at Throop Community School, is a black woman running for office. When Alissa tries to get Brooke’s support, saying,

“You’re a Black woman, I’m a Black woman. There’s a common endeavor” (p173)

Brooke rejects this concept.

Brooke had heard this all before. The power of tribe […] Brooke spent most of her time with white people, who never discussed the allegiance of race, because they did not need to. Somehow, to hear it thus seemed demeaning.” (p173)

When Jaffee’s black driver reaches out to her in solidarity, she was “cool to him” (123). Later, when she needs an elderly black doorman to give her entry, she plays up to him almost as an errant daughter,

Brooke’s contrite face was to conjure for him a daughter, a niece, a sister, a wife” (p201)

Brooke does not seem to want to make any common cause with Black people, but

Brooke always took note of the Black people […] It was a survival strategy, it was a tool” (p199).

Brooke understands her social capital, but does not want the give and take of it; she intends only to take.

 She reveals herself as an uncaring person, who moreover does not hold back from injuring even those she loves and who love her. Brooke is entrusted with a secret from her brother’s fiancée, and then reveals it just to distract attention from herself, seemingly not to think or care about the hurt and damage to her brother and his fiancée. She is extremely unkind to one of her best friends, Kim, just because Kim’s dead father left her a lot of money which frees Kim from needing to work for an income or to buy a property. Kim has always been wonderfully generous and kind to Brooke, but no one seems safe from Brooke’s random lashing out in envy. Brooke claims she does not want to get married, but although expresses joy for her brother’s engagement, is vicious about his fiancée, who seems both beautiful and sweet:

Brooke noticed how her brother couldn’t stop touching Rachel: knee, wrist, shoulder, all moisturized into softness, all the color of fatty cream” (p55)

This is a typical thought from Brooke, snidely nasty. Brooke fails to turn up at the funeral service for her mum’s good friend and the aunt she has known all her life, because Jaffee suddenly invites her somewhere else, and she does not hesitate to blow off her own family and community without a thought.

Brooke seems to have started out thinking she is owed all the good things of the world because somehow, in a never explained way, she ‘deserves’ it. Then she is given exposure to the really good things by associating with a billionaire, and she changes from just wanting, to learning to demand those good things, again, without any logic, other than she deserves it. It is never explained by Brooke what makes her different, special, and therefore deserving. That she wants, is her sole justification.

In some places, the book reads well. It does not bother with cliches, and is able to manage issues such as a white mother adopting a black daughter and a white son without so much as blinking. At the same time, it demonstrates it is well aware of race issues in New York, and shows the nuance of class intersected with race. However, the book puts in too many names of characters, who are just props in Brooke’s life, so sometimes it is hard to remember or keep track who they are. Who is Hillary? Kate? Jody? Etc. There are her colleagues, her mum’s friends, her estate agent, her financial agent, the many people who serve Jaffee, everyone is named and then the reader is supposed to remember all these people without clear personalities, just names and roles. This part of the writing is less polished. It is still quite readable apart from this stumbling block, but it is unclear why it matters what happens to a misguided, spoilt young woman, whose only value seems to lie in the fact she has the ear of a billionaire. To Brooke’s frustration, she only has his ear, not his money. And there lies the crux of her bind.

The ending goes nowhere in particular, no loose ends are tied up, nothing much is explained. We started with a narcissistic young woman and we end with the same. If there is a bildungsroman story. Then it is unclear how Brooke has grown and developed and what she has actually learnt, if anything. The characterisation of Jaffee was very weak, we get no sense at all of a real personality, he seems like a caricature of a rich old man. Just another prop to Brooke’s story. (Matthew, Brooke’s black gay friend, is the only one who calls her out, and the only character who is realistic.) I can only conclude, to try to understand this novel, that Brooke is some sort of sociopath, with their characteristic lack of empathy coupled with manipulativeness and surface charm, and sense of self-vindication which disregards rules and assumes oneself above or beyond such.

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