Immediately engaging, Who Is Rich? chronicles four days of a summer arts conference in a wilfully unidentified beachside town in New England, at “a college you’ve never heard of”. (Did the lacerating Matthew Klam fear getting sued?) The eponymous narrator, Rich, is a cartoonist, here to instruct largely talentless aspirants on his craft. If a protagonist who composes graphic novels is only a step removed from one who writes the literary kind, I was still grateful for the transposition. I can’t be the only one who’d happily sail through to the end of time never reading another piece of fiction whose main character is a fiction writer.
Twenty years earlier, Rich had been an up-and-coming wunderkind, having published a first book – and thus far, his only book – to rousing acclaim. Regarding such early success, Rich assures us: “At first it seems like there must be some mistake, but you get used to it in a hurry; you’re sure it’ll always be this way. You start to think that anyone making comics who is without a national reputation, or miserable or obscure and lacking attention from jerkoffs in Hollywood, is a fucking moron.”
How the mighty are fallen. In the present, Rich hasn’t published a cartoon for six years, so this teaching gig entails resting on laurels so dried up they’d be a fire hazard. He works as an illustrator at a faltering political magazine, and “illustration is to cartooning as prison sodomy is to pansexual orgy”. Klam may know something about the withering of youthful promise. Also about 20 years ago, having published his first and, until this novel, only book – a short-story collection, Sam the Cat – he harvested a crop of awards and was listed by the New Yorker as one of 20 notable authors under 40. Then: nothing. The danger of youthful promise is overpromising.
While worried he’s a fraud, Rich has money problems, and badly needs the conference’s fee. His marriage is strained and sexless. He has kids but, unlike your average female protagonist, he doesn’t keen about how sweet they are or anguish over the pain of being apart from them. He’s glad to be apart from them.
At the previous year’s conference, Rich had a dalliance with Amy, a billionaire financier’s unhappy wife, whose wealth he finds both alluring and gross. The two have exchanged furtive texts ever since. Now’s his chance to consummate the flirtation. The pro forma infidelity story (an established genre for male writers) is at least thrown a curveball by Amy’s sex-encumbering baseball accident, but will-they-or-won’t-they is not what makes this novel tick. I was far more fascinated by what would happen to the bracelet.
Feeling guilty, Rich finds a bracelet for his wife at a local jeweller that’s quite attractive. At $3,000, it had better be attractive. Impulsively, he puts the charge on a debit card whose bill his wife is sure to see. It will wipe out the account. The money is earmarked for their daughter’s pre-school fees that autumn. His wife is bound to be “stunned into something beyond hatred, more like fear. She’d think I lost my mind. This was the kind of thing borderlines did before they burned down the house.”
More impulsively still? He doesn’t give the bracelet to his wife. He gives it to Amy.
See, Rich is the kind of guy who feels there’s something wrong with his life, and whose instinctive response to its shortcomings is to make everything worse. Calamity is so much more dramatic than dissatisfaction – which is so, well, unsatisfying.
Klam is a dab hand at juxtaposition. Other faculty members are “embittered, delusional, accomplished, scared of spiders, unable to swim, loveless, and cruel”. The narrator often lists the elements of a vista with deadpan indiscrimination: “A skinny kid stared at me, wearing a sundress, mascara, and a pearl choker. A young Asian woman stared at him, clutching her pencil case. A young man in a white polo, a craggy-looking old guy, and a girl with button eyes and tiny feet were talking with affection about their dogs.” Klam evokes a sense of absurdity, but without resort to exaggeration – implying that absurdity lies abundantly on the surface of daily life if only you start noticing and write it down.
One discouraging word. Somehow this novel fails to land. It’s a book you’re apt to like more in the process of reading it than after you’ve finished, for it leaves you with a “well, so?” feeling. A tonal shift to lyricism in the last several pages substitutes for resolution of both character and plot. This is a stylish romp through the inbuilt disappointment of middle age, and endings aren’t everything. But it’s always nice to take a pleasurable journey and also arrive at a place you want to be.
• Who Is Rich? by Matthew Klam is published by Fourth Estate (£16.99). To order a copy for £14.44 go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
