The pitfalls of privilege and philanthropy: Entitlement, by Rumaan Alam, reviewed
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
