Rumaan Alam’s fourth novel, Entitlement, follows a young Black woman, Brooke Orr, as she starts a job at a charitable foundation run by Asher Jaffee, a white billionaire in his eighties who wants to give his fortune away. Asher singles Brooke out as an ally, and the more time that they spend together—working, talking, gliding through New York City in the back seat of Asher’s Bentley—the more Brooke sees herself as his protégé. Money, she gleans from her proximity to Asher, doesn’t only buy better art and real estate, it’s a means of tranquillity and personhood. And there’s a lot of it sloshing around. She just needs to seize it. “I don’t think that Brooke is a monster,” says Rumaan during our conversation. “She’s an American.” I spoke to Rumaan while he was on his book tour in Los Angeles, on a video call from London.
The interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
I’m about to put my pyjamas on in London, and you’re just getting going in LA. What’s your morning been like?
Because I’m in a hotel, it’s been an unusual morning. First of all, I slept until 7am—10am New York time—which is incredibly indulgent. It was a long travel day yesterday, and I was up late. At any rate, I slept in and ordered room service coffee, fruit, and granola, and I never eat breakfast like that, but my body clock was trying to adjust.
In New York, we’re an early family because my younger son has to go to school early, so we’re up at 6am. My husband makes the coffee, and I stun myself awake with it, and then I eat some almond butter and a banana and go to the gym. I’ll eat another breakfast after that, but usually just a protein shake. I’m not a breakfast person.
It’s funny having kids, because they wake up so unbelievably hungry, especially the ages they are now [12 and 15]. They’ll have a bowl of cereal, and then say, okay, I want an egg sandwich on a bagel, and another bowl of cereal, and well, can you also make me some oatmeal?
Do you walk them to school?
You won’t believe this, because your kids are still so little, but at a certain point they take themselves to school.
I do not believe it.
Prepare yourself. It’s coming for you. They do it themselves, and they don’t want you with them. They don’t want you kissing them on the cheek at drop-off. You know, I took my younger son to school a couple of times last year because it was a new school for him, and he would stop two blocks away and be like, okay! I’m going the rest of the way by myself.
So how does your day go after the kids are at school?
When I’m writing a book, I go to my office. It’s outside of our home and I share it with my husband, who’s a photographer, although our workspaces are very separate from one another. I sit at my computer and have another coffee and give myself 30 or 45 minutes to fool around and answer emails, tidy up and get in the zone.
I work until lunchtime and have a very early lunch around 11:30am, because I’m on a child’s schedule and we have dinner at 6pm.
What do you have for lunch?
I’m somebody who can have the same thing over and over again and find it very comforting. Lately I’ve had success with tuna salad and some baby carrots and a nectarine or whatever is in season.
I eat a lot of fruit because I have some impulse to eat to keep myself awake. You can only drink so much coffee, and I’m orally fixated while I’m working. When my kids were smaller and I was younger, I could eat, like, goldfish crackers or whatever rubbish we had around the house. But at this point I can’t sit around eating goldfish all day. That would not end happily for me, so I have to eat apples.
When do you call it a day?
I’m home by 5:30pm or 6pm, and you know, there’s always something to be done at the house. Put the laundry away, pick up the living room, put the breakfast dishes in the sink if I’ve skipped that. I usually make dinner in advance, so I have it ready to go, but I might make the next night’s dinner. Put on some music, get into evening mode. Help oversee homework, tell my younger son to practice his violin, remind my older son to come home from his friend’s house. The traffic cop part of being a parent.
And again, this is going to feel like an abstraction to you, but because my kids are big now, when dinner is done and the dishes are washed, there’s not much more required of me. I’ll get the kids ready for the next day, but then I might go back to my office to work for a couple of hours.
There is a lot of discipline to this routine.
Yes, I have a lot of time discipline. I do not like to waste time. I don’t like to feel at a loose end. I’m not great at relaxing unless I’ve budgeted for it, like okay, you are going to relax in this period.
I’m not saying I work all the time. But my relaxation is often work, in a way, because usually what I’m doing is reading. I’m blurbing and reviewing, and you know, reminding myself of what fiction is capable of, which is an important part of the job.
Actually, this summer, when we were at the beach, we really got into playing cards.
Which beach? Which card games?
Fire Island. We played Gin, and we played this other game called Shithead. I loved it. It was me and my husband playing. It’s nice to do something with the person that you care about. We just enjoy talking to each other, even if we inevitably talk about the kids.
How did the experience of writing Entitlement compare to your other novels?
This book was much, much more difficult to write than its predecessor [Leave the World Behind]. I did many more drafts of this book. I found it very hard. I thought I had an understanding of my process, but I was wrong, and it was a tough period for me.
What made it so difficult?
With my last book, getting the novel to feel fluid was easy. The initial draft was already the right shape; the pacing was baked into the dough. With Entitlement, I had to write the book and then chisel away at it to achieve that feeling of momentum.
I saw a very good friend of mine last night, the novelist Edan Lepucki, and we were having this conversation where I said, surely, now that I’ve written four books, on the fifth book, I’ll know exactly what to do. And she said, oh yeah, except that you’ll want to do something you haven’t done before, and you’ll realise you have to learn how to do that.
Entitlement digs into our preoccupations with money, which I thought was especially fascinating, because I spoke to the novelist Kiley Reid earlier this year about her novel, Come and Get It, which also focuses on money, and at the time we were saying, why aren’t there more contemporary novels on this topic? What do you think?
It’s impolite to talk about. There’s a feeling that it’s base. That it’s removed from what really matters.
I think it’s really crucial that in this book, I’m not talking about privation. It’s not the kind of storytelling that’s predicated on rags-to-riches. This is a book about having plenty and existing in a culture that has taught you to want more than that. And I think that’s what people don’t like to talk about.
Entitlement’s main character, Brooke, is motivated by money to the exclusion of almost everything else. She’s uninterested in finding a partner, she’s becoming distanced from her family and friends. What was it like to develop a character like that?
I love that aspect of her. I do think it makes her so illegible as to feel unreal to some readers, because we are accustomed to novels affirming that the only worthwhile goal in existence is a heterosexual partnership. There’s something so disobedient, particularly in a woman, who just says, actually, that’s not of interest to me. It feels transgressive, and I like that about her. It’s very important to who she is.
I think there are some readers who find it monstrous. I don’t think Brooke is a monster. She’s an American. You’re released into the world, and you want things, and you don’t even really understand why you want them. You understand yourself as a certain kind of person, and you must acquire these things in order to be that person. It’s what happened to me, it’s what happened to you.
On some level, you are just a demographic. And built into that demographic is the consumer, is want and desire, and it’s removed from who you are at your core, but nevertheless, it’s how you establish who you are for the benefit of other people.
Are you reading anything good on your book tour?
I’m not reading a lot on tour, but I read a lot this summer. People had been telling me to read Barbara Pym for a long time, and that if I liked Anita Brookner—I love Anita Brookner—that I would like Barbara Pym. I read Excellent Women and I loved it so much.
I read The Cheffe by the French novelist Marie Ndiaye, who should be much more famous in this country than she is. It was an astonishing, incredible book about art and personality. Oh, and you know what I listened to this summer that was fantastic, the Meryl Streep audio recording of Tom Lake by Ann Patchett. It’s like having Meryl Streep read you a bedtime story. Who’s going to say no to that?
I’ve been trying to read the classics, too, because there’s so much I haven’t read. I read East of Eden by John Steinbeck. It’s fantastic, unbelievable. I mean, of course it is. There’s a reason we’re still reading it all these years later. But as an English student, you have this perception of the classics as a little inert and boring and nutritious, right? And then you can be surprised. I also had that experience with Willa Cather a few years ago. The first novel of hers that I read was O Pioneers! and I was like, oh, this book rules. It’s extraordinary. It is not about covered wagons or something. I read all of her books after that.
I love Henry James, but those books are so difficult to read. They really do feel like a cognitive test. I read The Ambassadors a few years ago and I was like, wow, I am stupid. I need an espresso every other chapter to stay inside what is happening and what the language is actually doing.
After this publicity tour is finished, will you take some time off before your next book?
I think that for this kind of job, the cycle of artistic production is one of input and output, and you have to go through phases of input in order to work. Fall and winter are good times for both sides of the process, in my experience. When things settle down and I’m not on the road, I’ll probably read more and watch movies and be filling myself up. I hope to start my next book in January.
Rumaan wears the TOAST Garment Dyed Brushed Cotton Jacket.
Words by Jo Rodgers.
Photography by Raphael Gaultier.
Add a comment