Money can’t buy you love, the Beatles sang. But that doesn’t matter so much if you’re not interested in love, like Brooke Orr, the 33-year-old heroine of Rumaan Alam’s fourth novel, Entitlement. In contrast to Alam’s wildly successful, lockdown-resonant Leave the World Behind, the latest book is set in 2014, during the era of ‘Obama’s Placid America’, a world depicted as a virtually frictionless pre-Trump utopia in which ‘black, gorgeous, serious, passionate’ young women such as Brooke can thrive. When she leaves her teaching job and joins the charitable Asher and Carol Jaffee Foundation – started after the benign octogenarian billionaire Asher Jaffee lost his daughter – she realises that money is where her heart lies. Yet Alam is at pains to investigate why Brooke Orr (and the auric resonance of her surname is surely intentional) is not straightforwardly avaricious.
She is adopted, with a white mother, and two white siblings, and while she appears confident, a worm of insecurity gnaws at her constantly: ‘Her own mother… had not wanted her.
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