CONFIDENCE

A pair of juvenile delinquents engineer a global wellness scam.

None dare call it a Trump story, but Frumkin's second novel—following The Comedown (2018)—is plainly concerned with how a transparent grifter can siphon millions out of people with little more than empty promises and a modicum of charisma. As the story opens, the narrator, Ezra Green, is 17 and stuck at a reform camp for selling a blend of salt and Sudafed as a street drug. There, he meets Orson Ortman, a handsome huckster with bigger ambitions. Launching various grifts (fake high-fashion T-shirts, conning expensive recording gear out of a trust-fund brat), a romance soon blooms between them, culminating in a company called NuLife, which promises bliss through little more than some magnetized headgear and temple massaging. Remarkably quickly they launch a spendy retreat called the Farm and expand into a politically wobbly South American country. Orson’s ego balloons as Hollywood celebrities and the Dalai Lama arrive at the Farm, and a jealous Ezra is determined to regain his affections; but when the only way you know to express your love is deceit, a stable relationship is hard to come by. Frumkin uses NuLife as an entertaining launchpad for a satire of Scientology-style cults, wellness bunkum, and cutthroat capitalism. (An Elon Musk–like billionaire tech mogul builds some dubious technology around NuLife.) Unlike The Comedown, an impressively rangy, big-picture novel, this one is narrower and more conventional. The simplicity exposes some hard-to-buy plot turns—Ezra becomes inexplicably reckless at times, and the business world is overly credulous of Orson. (Plus, Ezra’s ever growing glaucoma is metaphorically on-the-nose.) The novel’s greatest strength isn’t its analysis of American-made frauds but as a love story, ending with a plot twist that’s at once witty and wrenching.

An earnest riff on evergreen themes of love, money, and betrayal.