THE AUDACITY

The spouse of a scandal-plagued entrepreneur drowns his sorrows at a Caribbean retreat.

Chapman’s second novel, following Riots I Have Known (2019), centers on Guy Sarvananthan, the son of Sri Lankan immigrants, a failed composer, and, as the story opens, the husband of a vanished wife, Victoria Stevens. Her kayak was found empty in San Francisco Bay and it looks like she’s drowned, but Guy surmises that she’s likely faked her death before word gets out that her startup, which claimed to have a cure for cancer, has come up empty. Rather than head west from New York to play-act as a concerned husband, he co-opts Victoria’s invitation to the Quorum, a Davos-style masters-of-the-universe gathering on a private island owned by a Bezos-ian figure. From there, Chapman’s novel becomes a satire of the ultrarich on two tracks. Chapters narrated by Victoria describe her escape to Joshua Tree, meticulously tracking her wellness and productivity while rationalizing her fraud. Guy, meanwhile, insinuates himself as a boozy, druggy habitue of the billionaire set, at least until Victoria’s fraud is revealed (“I don’t want to think about any problems,” he says. “My goal is ruinous intake”). Which is to say that both of Chapman’s leads are contemptible, if to a purpose: He means to expose how moral rot infects the 0.25 percent, mainly by showing how the gathering, ostensibly meant for the sake of organized, well-financed do-gooderism, degenerates into self-interested squabbling. But though he has a keen eye for the foibles of the new gilded age, Chapman has done his job almost too well—his efforts to make Guy a nuanced character (immigrant, artistically talented, skeptical) make his ultimate narcissism and blithe self-destructiveness all the more frustrating. Unlikable characters are fair game in fiction; abjectly, determinedly hollow ones are a tougher sell.

A cutting, if frustrating, eat-the-rich yarn.