THE BEGGAR'S PAWN

A well-to-do couple is challenged by charity in this posthumous novel.

When David and Maggie Holliss, out walking their dog, first meet the aspiring novelist Reginald Parker, it’s 2001, and “they looked like what they were: a couple suspended between middle and old age, happy, wealthy, content. And comfortably godless.” David is a soon-to-retire literature professor at Stanford; Maggie is a minor heiress; and their marriage is “a meeting of minds and hearts that excluded everybody else, even their children.” But when, in 2009, Reginald—still an aspiring novelist—leaps in front of a UPS truck to save their dog’s life and then promptly asks a grateful Maggie for a $200 loan, the Hollisses’ prosperous solitude is unexpectedly imperiled. In addition to his novelistic ambitions, Reginald is a narcissist, petty criminal, and freeloader who feels simultaneously insulted by and entitled to David and Maggie’s ready charity. He cadges the Hollisses for more loans—to support his family, to support his drug habit, and to punish them for their willingness to give. He also embarks on an affair with Claire, the Hollisses' caustic middle-aged daughter, and eventually deploys his own neglected child, Iris, as a pawn, first to guilt the Hollisses into giving more money, then to punish them for their refusal to give any more of it. Working in Iris Murdoch’s frantically plotted tradition, L’Heureux uses a deft, omniscient narration to highlight the little human hypocrisies within his characters and the blatant miscommunications that define their relationships. The result is a roller coaster of a novel that—despite some missteps—generally treads a careful line between comedy and caricature while engaging in a poignant commentary on the interplay between charity and justice. Early on, when Claire tells the story about how she tried to become a nun but disagreed with the Mother Superior’s emphasis on charitable acts rather than justice—“Justice includes charity because charity has to be earned,” Claire states, “it has to be deserved”—David seems to speak for the reader when he decides he’s “never heard such an exercise in sloppy thinking.” By the novel’s end, however, readers might be wondering whether Claire, unbeknownst to herself, was on to something.

A fine addition to the L’Heureux canon.