Entitlement
By Rumaan Alam
Riverhead, 288 pages, $30
Brooke Orr, the protagonist of Rumaan Alam’s captivating recent novel, Entitlement, lands what she thinks is a great new job as a program officer at a big New York philanthropic foundation. The book is about money and morality in general—but also about power and how people perceive or misperceive it, purposefully or not. While the foundation in Alam’s plot, the Asher and Carol Jaffee Foundation, is gauzily liberal, he doesn’t really “impose” any ideological template on Entitlement. Instead, the author offers insights into the effects of money and power on the professionals who work in establishment philanthropy, which is almost monoculturally progressive.
As those of us in this world know all too well, the baleful effects are difficult to overcome by even well-intentioned individuals; often, they end up only perpetuating the corruption and monoculture.
Judging by my experience on the program staff of Milwaukee’s conservative Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, its observations about how program officers are perceived could easily apply just as much to conservative philanthropy. Indeed, Alam’s details evince an in-the-know familiarity with the “trade”: the hurriedly developed staff “expertise” in a subject newly determined to be part of the foundation’s mission; the just-below-the-surface chafing at the power differential at play in discussions between staff and grant applicants; the grant-amount expectations raised and dashed.
Entitlement can improve our understanding of how what conservatives used to call the New Class, now called the “managerial elite” or something similar, became and remains the way it is. Alam’s novel has empathy for members of this class, as represented by Brooke Orr, even as it is also sharply critical of them. Brooke is a 33-year-old black woman who was adopted and raised by a single white mother, a lawyer who runs an organization dedicated to abortion rights. After graduating from Vassar, Brooke became a teacher but fared poorly and was soon dismissed. In Big Philanthropy’s unique labor market, she secured a position on the program staff of the Jaffee Foundation.