Rumaan Alam's latest novel steps into a world of wealth — and questions who's entitled to it

CBC

28-01-2025

How would you spend an inconceivable amount of money? That's one of the questions Rumaan Alam explores in his latest novel, Entitlement.
Entitlement tells the story of Brooke, a woman in her thirties who gets a new job helping an elderly billionaire who wants to give away large parts of his fortune before he dies. This proximity to wealth is dizzying and intoxicating — yet it pushes Brooke closer and closer to sliding into madness.
" Entitlement explores the influence of money: who has it, who needs it, and how it shapes thinking around class privilege and power," said Mattea Roach in the introduction to their conversation with Alam on Bookends.
" Entitlement asks a lot of questions while challenging readers to come up with their own answers."
Alam is the Brooklyn author of the novel Leave the World Behind, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and was adapted into a major movie. His other books include novels Rich and Pretty and That Kind of Mother and his writing has appeared in The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and The New Yorker.
He joined Roach to discuss the meaning behind his book's title, why his protagonist feels so untethered and the secret wealth that nobody talks about.
Mattea Roach: I want to start by asking about the title of this new book, Entitlement, which I think is also really the theme of the novel in many respects. It certainly makes a statement, and there are multiple ways you could interpret the title. I'm wondering what inspired this title and what inspired you to write this book at this moment?
Rumaan Alam: The title of this novel was extremely hard to arrive at. Actually, I had the whole novel written before I sort of landed on Entitlement as kind of the single word that was able to distill what the book is talking about.
What I like about it as a title though, is the word's elasticity. Entitlement sounds one way to the reader. It sounds like the novel is going to engage in a conversation that I think is one we're having in a lot of corners of the culture right now about privilege and about the attitude of the individual.
Entitlement in the West, though, also has this other connotation of social welfare. Welfare programs, state welfare programs are often sort of talked about in policy language as entitlement programs, which I think is so interesting because it is as though the state is acknowledging there is a human entitlement to shelter and food, for example.
But those entitlements to shelter and food are not actually enshrined in law. All you need to do is visit any major metropolitan area in which houses cost about $1 million. You will see people, citizens of that state, who are not availed of the human entitlement to shelter, let alone food.
Entitlement has this kind of funny breadth where it seems like it's talking about the individual attitude, but it's also talking about something bigger. That is what I liked about it. And it feels a bit like a litmus test to me for the reader.
MR: I want to talk about the main character of Entitlement, Brooke. She's a Black woman in her 30s who seems lost in life. She doesn't really have a vocation in her career. She's had a privileged upbringing, but privileged in the sense that she can't just not work and skate off of her parents wealth. Who is she at the start of the book?
RA: Even in your introduction or to this person you pointed out that she's lost hold of a sense of self because she doesn't have a fixed vocation, which is so interesting to me because in so much of contemporary life, the identity is so closely associated with the profession.
You are what you do. If you don't do, then who are you? That is part of Brooke's problem.
She's had a kind of abortive career working as an educator. She has great privilege in the way that I have great privilege. She's educated, she has her health. She's a solidly middle-class person. It's not the kind of cartoonish wealth that would allow her an adulthood of being a dilettante. She can't just collect art and go shopping all day. She has to have a profession.
In part, it's because of the imperatives of money, right? You have to have a job to pay your rent. But in part, it's because you need to have a sense of who you are and that is how you define who you are in our culture — by what you do.
That eludes Brooke and that creates the conditions in which she realizes, over the course of the book, how little she understands precisely who she is.
MR: I'm wondering where this fascination with these secret layers of money, the idea that a lot of people have wealth that isn't always apparent, comes from and whether that's maybe tied to some of these experiences living in New York and kind of having this outsider's view almost when you first arrived.
RA: It probably is a kind of narrow personal interest: my attention or awareness of money and its stealth power in the lives of people who are my peers. But this is extant, I think, in so much of life. You're part of a community and you sort of think of all members of that community as being like you.
You go to your kid's friend's birthday party and you can tell by going into the home that this family has a lot more money than you. Or can tell by going into the home that the family has old money, which is also a different kind of meaning and a different kind of power.
We understand what it means when we see it and yet we know it is not to be said. - Rumaan Alam
I don't know why I'm interested in that, but I think it's so counter to the American mythology of all of us being created equally. It's impolite to talk about. I'm interested in that. I'm interested in the ways in which it's impolite to acknowledge the function of money in our own lives and in the lives of our peers.
And yet we become attuned to reading it. We understand what it means when we see it and yet we know it is not to be said.