ROLE PLAY

Thirty-something Vivian must confront the uncomfortable fact of her enormous privilege.

Vivian lives in an apartment in Rio de Janeiro, bought by her parents for her 30th birthday, which is decorated with designer furniture and prints from a series showing at the local art museum. She’s a freelance curator, one who can afford to take resume-boosting jobs—when money’s tight, she rents out her apartment and moves back into one of her family’s four properties. In her free time, she goes to raves and snorts cocaine with her friends, all of whom are part of Brazil’s cultural elite. Vivian operates in such a rarified realm that she’s been taught she is upper-middle-class—the true upper echelon, in her eyes, have their own private planes. This self-perception is at once deluded and not inaccurate, creating “a sense of inferiority that is very specific, kind of comic and also kinda sad.” One night, as Vivian and friends are in line for a rave, police attack two street vendors, one of whom usually works on Vivian’s street and from whom she often buys beer. Vivian and her friends flee the violence by entering the rave venue; much later, she learns that the vendor, Darlene, has died from a head wound, presumably inflicted by the police that night. Vivian is not a total stranger to dark and unpleasant feelings—she’s been heavily medicated for mental illness since the age of 10—but this violence, so abrupt and so close in proximity, needles her. But can it shock her out of the cocoon of her own privilege? Drummond’s narrative voice is fiercely honest, coolly cynical, and sharply scathing: “What was I supposed to feel: Grief, guilt, indifference, sadness? It was like I’d entered a new environment whose codes I didn’t properly know, and I was supposed to understand, intuitively, how to behave and act in the moment, based on that understanding.” Vivian is not an especially appealing character; and yet, remarkably, Drummond manages to elicit readers’ empathy for her, mining her most fundamental and human flaws and insecurities.

An unsparing critique of Brazil’s young elites.