The Privileges

In Jonathan Dee’s new novel, the characters learn that freedom is not another word for nothing less to lose. It is a symbol of nothing left to gain. Readers have a close-up view of a way they will never be, living in privilege beyond the pale. We are fascinated outsiders who are able to crash the parties, activities, and minds of the possessors of significant wealth.

Dee introduces families and friends at the wedding of Adam and Cynthia celebrated in the hinterlands of Pittsburgh. Personality revealing vignettes are presented simultaneously, one character thinking about the no-barriers future while another trades stories of a gilded history with a lifelong friend at a blue collar bar.

Although we have observed second hand and with show more great fascination the privileged class, Dee’s skillful narrative puts readers right in the room with them. We are so close that I was embarrassed by the clothing I was wearing while reading the novel. Like Proust’s description of nobility in The Guermantes Way, we can understand the characters’ motivations, thoughts, and actions but can only imagine the other-worldly dimensions of their consciousness.

Even when Dee allows us to live later with Adam and Cynthia and their two children, April and Jonas, we think we know them while having only limited insight into their character. Each of the four family members’ personalities unfold within very wide boundaries compared to the cramped structures of our own lives. The dimensions of the world of significant wealth are so far-flung that the characters try to observe the values of others less fortunate to find some irreducible starting point. Of course, in the novel there is no such absolute zero, no standard to anchor a unifying philosophy. On the other end of the spectrum, there is no class above them. The best the family members can do is rely on solipsism and develop rules of conduct and understanding that are unique to each person but with intersecting areas that keep the family together with a very close bond.

The mind views of Adam, Cynthia, April, and Jonas encompass the realm of infinite personal wealth. The assumption of nothing left to gain makes past mistakes, indiscretions, and illegal money building strategies irrelevant to their present noble life. So, the family members keep running (literally for Adam) with the exercise privately timed and juggled to situations leaving readers in the dust. When local and world history change, these privileged characters naturally repurpose information, and moral relativism becomes too restrictive, too passé.

The four main characters are forever time-urgent and predictably other-serving rather than self-serving. Adam, for example, has a rather heroic personal code of conduct as strict and meaningful as Hemingway’s Robert Jordon in For Whom the Bell Tolls, but it is determined by the life of the mind rather than the life of action.

This is a top notch novel that involves a great story, detailed character development, and a liberating unifying philosophy. We readers can see that we have the privileges in spades, in our own minds. I highly recommend this novel for readers to enjoy and gain an intimate perspective on the contemporary families who are beyond the social register, beyond condescension, like Proust’s Guermantes. show less

The most telling quote of this book for me was early on in the story. Cynthia, a young bride on her wedding day, is thinking back to the planning for the event. The groom, Adam, had been in favor of something simpler, “But the truth was that that wouldn't have seemed unusual enough to Cynthia, too little distinct from a typical Saturday night out drinking and dancing with their friends, just with fancier clothes and a worse band. She wasn't completely sure why the idea should appeal to her at all – the big schmaltzy wedding, the sort of wedding for which everyone would have to make travel plans – but she didn't make a habit of questioning her wants.”

Not questioning one's wants is what this book is about. It is about people who show more feel so entitled that their very wanting something justifies getting it, and the means necessary to do so.

This proves true throughout Adam and Cynthia's life together. Though they do seem to love and be faithful to one another – their main commonality seems not to be desire for each other, but desire for things, for status, for power, for the bigger and better and faster and newer.

This kind of thinking also shapes their parenting skills. When reflecting on her children, Cynthia thinks, “What was supposed to be the point of denying them anything? Who decided that not having things that your parents hadn't had either was character building somehow?” “And what was the point of getting hung up on how much things cost?”

I must have read that sentence about not denying your children anything at least three times. Though I know that sentiment is out there, even in parents that can't afford to live by that way of reasoning, the thought makes me almost ill. The children that result from the absence of the word “no” in their lives are not ones that will neither live happy nor productive lives, nor be people I hope to encounter very often.

April, Adam and Cynthia's daughter, certainly proves this to be true. “If, in a given activity, there was a next step to be taken – a taller cliff to dive from, purer drugs to try, something bigger and more difficult to steal – someone, at some point, was going to take that step, it was like a law of nature, and so let the record reflect that that someone was her.”

This thought is a mirror of one her father has - “That was it: everything was open to them. What was life's object if not that? Adam knew on some level that he had to get as much money out of those Anguillian accounts as possible and shut them down, but more than that he wanted to just spend it all on the three of them, as orgiastically, challenge his family to come up with desires they hadn't even thought of yet and then make those desires real.”

This is a book about people I don't understand and don't admire in the least. That is not to say it's a bad book, it's a story well and probably accurately told about people who have egos and desires even bigger than their grotesquely large bank accounts.

(On a side note? There was one laugh out loud moment when the Hamptons are referred to as “a game preserve for rich people”.)

“The Privileges” is a book about the ultra rich...and the children of the ultra rich. It's about a world that few of us understand and even fewer will ever experience. It's about a mindset that doesn't see any ramifications from one's actions, as long as those actions benefit oneself. It's a story that seems lurking behind the eyes of more and more people on the news these days...those people who are finally realizing that their privileges can't always save them from themselves. show less

The best thing about the Privileges, far and away, is the opening scene (which lasts for about the first 20% of the book, so not trivial) Dee opens on the wedding between two relatively normal people with big ambitions and focuses on their interactions with each other, their friends, their parents and their siblings. In this microcosm of their relationship, each character is nuanced and each interaction is deftly painted: the overbearing mother, the chronically late spoiled rich kid, the "alternative" step-sister who is SO over this. It's funny and relatable. (This scene deserves all the stars, so I'm going to keep this a three star review, instead of two, which is what the rest of the book deserves.)

And then...it's like when you meet show more someone and you have this great conversation with them and you have so much in common and you imagine this entire friendship spreading out before you, but then the next time you get together they spout vaguely offensive views and only want to talk about football and you realize you don't actually have anything in common? The first amazing scene is what makes the rest of the lackluster book hurt so much. Because everything else is lackluster. It's not bad, certainly, but it's just boring. Flat as paper characters wander around their super rich life, with their super perfect marriage to each other. And as much as there's no characterization, there's not really plot either. Yes, things happen, but they aren't related to each other and they result in no change upon the flimsy characters. Dee is trying to make a point about wealth and all of his characters and plot are servants to his point.

This book is basically a fable about wealth, but it's not even clear to me what point about wealth Dee is trying to make. There's the disaffected rich girl and the boy who's rich but want's to be a Trustafarian and then the rich woman who devotes her time to charities, but apparently earnestly so, and the rich man who maybe cheated the system to get rich, but then the book implies later that he continued to get rich even after he stopped insider-trading. And there's a very short bit about the hypocrisy of supporting charities while getting rich off of factories in China, which was interesting, but only lasted about two paragraphs.

Finally, the last 20% made me want to tear my hair out. For no good reason that I can understand, Dee decides to intercut three different threads, for over 50 pages. Intercutting is a literary technique that can drive me crazy at the best of times, but intercutting that many scenes, which were totally unrelated for that long was a special sort of obnoxious. The intercuts came quickly enough that it was hard to get into any scene, and since there were three other stories to cut into, you lost all emotional resonance with the first one by the time you got back to it. (For the record, just to help emphasize the bizarreness, the threads were:

-the son becomes takes an art class, becomes involved with his TA, who is into outsider art; he becomes fascinated by outsider art; he eventually tries to meet an artist; he gets kidnapped; he escapes)
-the daughter goes to a nightclub and gets drunk. She gets picked up by some "EuroTrash" guys. They crash her parents beach house. They party and wreck the house. They drive home and get into a car crash. Her parents punish her by making her dad take her with him on his business trip to China. They go to China. They visit a factory and she thinks it's hypocritical that her dad invests in a factory in China (even though none of the real problems with Chinese labor are actually on view here -- it seems to be a factory staffed exclusively by adults and teenagers, without any apparent bad labor conditions.)
-The mother's father is dying in a hospice. She's called by the father's girlfriend, whom she didn't know existed. She flies to Florida, where he is. She sits at his bedside. She pays the father's girlfriend to go away. The father eventually dies.

Now imagine reading those plots 3 to 4 pages at a time, separated by 10 pages of other stuff. show less

A well-written, sharply observed novel chronicling the ascent of Adam and Cynthia Morey, a pair of go-getters who ride the financial boom of the late nineties to social prominence and fabulous wealth. What makes this novel remarkable is the restraint that Jonathan Dee shows in telling their story. The Moreys, who are self-centered and not particularly given to self-reflection, are unlikely protagonists, but Dee refrains from judging them. Resisting the urge to score points with cheap irony or sarcasm, he describes their inner lives and motivations using clean, linear prose that betrays neither disapproval nor sympathy. The Moreys aren't Patrick Bateman-style psychopaths, or even particularly tragic figures. They're pragmatic and show more unimaginative to a fault, people who's taken the virtues of hard work and self-interest to their logical extremes. In Dee's narrative, their egocentricity and ethical lapses are made to seem less like personality flaws than the natural products of their particularly American, particularly modern worldviews. Adam might be guilty of insider trading, but he doesn't characterize himself as a criminal or a deviant. He and his wife are simply consummate operators who are willing to maximize every advantage life offers them. Readers seeking a Great Recession-era update to Fitzgerald's "The Beautiful and Damned" or Wolfe's "The Bonfire of the Vanities" are guaranteed to be disappointed by "The Privileges."

Also notable is Dee's treatment of Jonas, the Morey's son, who endeavors to distance himself from his family's fortune in an effort to formulate a system of values unique to himself. He ends up, as many youths in his position do, becoming obsessed with popular music, and then drifts in to the world of outsider art. As a former upper-middle class record nerd, I found Jonas's yearning for "authenticity" particularly resonant, even though the author seems to conclude that everything, even authenticity, is molded by money's pervasive influence. show less

I really liked this book. It was written with a subtle humor and although the telling of the tale began to slow about 2/3rd of the way through, it was only a brief segment and it quickly picked up and gained momentum as it raced toward its conclusion.
This story began with a young, upwardly mobile couple as they prepare for their marriage. Their wedding day is scrutinized. You can feel their youthful exuberance. They are a charmed couple and believe they can make the rules, defying authority, laughing at the system. Whether or not they grow and mature, break the rules and succeed, is immaterial, in the end. The only thing that is important is their abiding affection for each other. For the reader, it will bring back the memories of one's show more own planning of any event, complete with the anxieties and joyfulness. It will take the reader through the memories of their lives with familiar scenes bringing knowing smiles of recognition to their faces. The family dynamics are really amusing and true to form. In this case there are blended families involved and their interrelationships are often hilarious. As the story moves through the years, we see the couple change. The book is one in which several generations may identify. It is hard to come up with a reason that someone might not enjoy this book, unless the stereotyping of the generations feels overwhelming. It is best to just keep turning the pages with the Moreys. You will not be disappointed. Cynthia is a stay at home mom. Adam is climbing the ladder of success in the investment world. He lives his life to make Cynthia happy. The children, April and Jonas, are living in the lap of luxury. They are not in touch with reality or with true emotions. Neither the children nor the parents, can do wrong, even when they most decidedly, do wrong. No matter what happens, Adam and Cynthia "fix" it. There is always a way to handle whatever happens for money is power and control and it has bought them privileges not afforded to the ordinary person. Even as a perfect couple, they grew somewhat dissatisfied as the years passed. They felt they were missing something and wanted more. Having attained one dream they turned their attention to another. They pushed every envelope to its limit as they climbed higher and higher into the world of the rich. They had to keep on buying, doing and going. What started out as a simple adventure into marriage and family turned into an experiment in greed. They lived to attain things. Their children loved them but they also pushed the envelope and disobeyed the rules knowing their cool parents would bail them out and provide them with whatever they wished. I thought the Moreys were hypocrites. They felt they were above the laws and rules for mere mortals. Their mistakes were never rectified, they were justified and covered up. Though I found the characters to be unpleasant people, I couldn't dislike them. The author made them believable. People were drawn to them as I was. Their charisma moved them forward. For every negative aspect portrayed, another favorable one was ready in the wings to stand beside it. It is a timeless novel for readers of all ages. I identified with many of the scenes and saw my own children in others. The lack of privileges or their abundance, matters not; the book made one think about the meaning of privilege and the access it offers. Does responsibility toward others come with the assumption of privilege? What legacy do we leave behind when we "shuffle off this mortal coil?" What are acceptable means to achieve it? show less

Shows how a strong couple holds their marriage and family together in the context of extreme wealth. A theme across many characters concerned the risks and potential rewards of living in the moment and not reflecting on the past. For the main protagonists, this perspective is richly rewarded by the financial industry. I think the perspective may also may be a key to the couple's strong marriage in so far as they continually choose one another. However, the perspective doesn't play out as well for their children or other relatives, giving the book a moral message about the thin line between success and tragedy in modern life. The theme is also repeated through a mentally ill artist that acts out impulsively and is obsessively stuck in show more repetitive art. His art comes from working without any apparent consciousness or ambition, which reinforces his pathetic life and also almost earns him widespread recognition and fame. The novel led me to reflect on family, love, parenthood, ambition, and the fairness of society. Great humane writing throughout. show less

Why do the "limitless possibilities" offered to the hugely wealthy always end up with the same Rich People's Shopping List of the usual acquisitions: multiple homes, vacations, clothes & jewels, private school, private jet. We've all been hearing about all of this for years. What's new and different? Nice things, but it seems everyone has no imagination and all aspire to the same things. The lives of the real robber barons like Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller were undoubtedly much more interesting than these fictional characters. Those guys knew how to live large.

In any case, possibilities aren't limitless even for the super-rich. You can rent the New York Public Library for one night for your anniversary, but you can't buy the show more place. You can buy a flat in London, but you can't buy Buckingham Palace. You can't buy immortality. You can't buy health & safety for your kids if they're determined to kill themselves through their own wilfull stupidity. Adam & Cynthia's quest for enough wealth to obtain all they want without limits is bound to fail, unless they curtail their wants to the standard Rich People's Shopping List.

This pair are boring through the first three sections in the book, and in the last section, Cynthia becomes not only unbelievable but somewhat creepy. How are we supposed to believe that this woman who walked away from her past & everyone in it on her wedding day is devastated at the impending death of her abandoning father? Is she devastated because he is the only one who ever walked away from her? The scene where she buys off her father's sixty-something girlfriend so she can have him all to herself as he dies gave me the crawls.

Glad I only borrowed this one from the library; it wouldn't have been any "privilege" to have spent my own money on it. show less