The star-crossed pair of forty-something lovers in Who Is Rich? are as tormented by what they do to each other as the significantly younger, student couple in Sally Rooney's Normal People. Both lengthy tales have their characters resort to drunkeness and sex. The difference is, however, that you get plenty of acerbic humour from Matthew Klam who was once named one of the '20 Best American Fiction Writers under 40' by The New Yorker magazine. Normal People is a deal more serious, I doubt if there is one laugh in it.
Who Is Rich? is on the shelves since the summer but unlike the Sally Rooney opus, you will not hear it talked about, certainly not in this country. Yet fellow American fiction writers Curtis Sittenfeld, Jennifer Egan and Richard Ford all pay homage.
Who Is Rich? is just as painful as Normal People in terms of the lethal doses of punishment, mostly self-administered, by the two protagonists. The early lives of the characters are delivered with some seriousness - they have to be as there is suffering - but the present-day stuff though is in large part intended to be farcical. Social pretension and academic ambition, that pathetic cycle of ongoing competition between practitioners in the same field is generally the butt of Klam's caustic prose. He knows his fellow Americans well.
Rich, the narrator of the piece is a respected cartoonist who had a brief flurry of success, monetary and otherwise, with a graphic novel, some 20 years ago. However, he is no longer hot property or the next big thing. The tale is set sometime around the Mitt Romney/Dick Cheney era and both are lightly, briefly satirised and such references nicely establish period. Rich has a commission to draw Mitt as part of the humdrum magazine work he is now reduced to, to pay the bills.
So Rich is not rich by any means, and, yes, there seems to be a sly nod in the title to John Updike's masterful novel, Rabbit is Rich. Or maybe not. Whatever about that, there are distinct echoes in Rich of Updike and his lecherously busy veteran car dealer, 'Rabbit' Angstrom. There the comparison ends, however, as Rich is an artist essentially and Mr Angstrom was not. Cars and cartoons, the two don't mix.
Our eponymous hero beats himself up about using his contemptuous wife Robin and his lovable two kids as material for his devoutly-to-be-wished-for next cartoon novella or graphic novel. The very fact that he uses his neurotically shredded life as material makes Rich an artist, however self-hating, and indeed self-deprecating he is. He insists on seeing himself in a very poor light, he is a glass half empty kind of guy.
At the week-long summer arts conference where much of the novel is set, he is resuming the liaison begun tentatively with Amy O'Donnell, wife of an unfeeling plutocrat whom he met at the same conference the previous summer. She is first generation Irish, a wife and mother in an unhappy marriage, who assuages her feelings of guilt about wealth by worthy social projects.
So, while Rich is poor and Amy is rich, at least they have kids in common and spouses they find it impossible to have satisfactory emotional lives with. The solution, clearly, is not as simple as uprooting and running away though they fantasise about that.
This zippy 320-page campus tale is relayed through the filter of Rich's acerbic and frankly bizarre imagination. Accompanying illustrations were done by one John Cuneo, but, like most novels, the yarn could have done with a 100-page trim. Talk is cheap, as indeed paper and ink must be.
Still, Who is Rich? is mostly good fun and perhaps a better tonic for your health than Normal People, as at least the suffering is counterbalanced by zany farce.
