The audacity

Ryan Chapman

Book - 2024

"In 72 hours, a blockbuster exposé will reveal Victoria Stevens' multibillion-dollar startup as a massive fraud. And Victoria has gone missing. Has she faked her death, leaving her husband Guy Sarvananthan to face the fallout-and potential jail time? Should Guy flee to his native Sri Lanka, an outcast and a failure? Or embrace denial? Why not: He takes the corporate jet to a private Caribbean island, where the 0.0001% have gathered to decide which one of the world's biggest problems to "eradicate forever." Guy drinks and drugs his way into oblivion, through manicured jungles and aboard superyachts, amid captains of industry, legions of staff, and unlikely saboteurs. Meanwhile, Victoria narrates her side of the stor...y from an off-the-grid location in the California desert. In scribbled diary entries shot through with cultish self-help mantras, she plots her comeback, confident she'll prove everyone wrong. Again."--

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Subjects
Genres
Satirical literature
Novels
Published
New York, NY : Soho 2024.
Language
English
Main Author
Ryan Chapman (author)
Physical Description
pages ; cm
ISBN
9781641295628
Contents unavailable.
Review by Booklist Review

Chapman proves his staying power as a shrewd and suspenseful satirist in his second novel, following Riots I Have Known (2019). The setup is a riff on the notorious Theranos scam run by Elizabeth Holmes and Ramesh Balwani. Chapman's steely mastermind, billionaire Victoria Stevens, claims to have discovered a cure for cancer. Just before her mega-con is outed, she disappears into the California desert where she subjects herself to extreme physical and mental exertions and deprivation in pursuit of a solution to the crisis, leaving her curiously passive husband, Guy Sarvananthan, on the hot seat. He flees to a privately owned Caribbean island for a Davos-like gathering of the world's richest, most despicably selfish elites who pretend to care about saving the world amidst outrageously decadent luxury. As Guy pursues potentially suicidal dissolution to touching and darkly comic effect, he reflects on his childhood as a Sri Lankan immigrant in Minneapolis and his failure to launch a career as a classical composer. Chapman conveys malignant excess, arrogance, and greed in scenes of dizzying apocalyptic detail and acid humor.

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Chapman (Riots I Have Known) unspools a droll dramedy loosely based on the spectacular fall of fraudulent healthcare startup Theranos. Victoria Stevens purports to cure cancer with her company, PrevYou. She's married to Guy, a lapsed composer who enjoys New York City's "gala circuit" and the "sudden, stratospheric wealth" derived from Victoria's business. As news about the fraud at the center of PrevYou is about to break, Victoria fakes her death. Guy, who's "never had a real job," is blindsided. In the aftermath, he decides to fly, in Victoria's stead, to "the Quorum," a Davos-like conference where billionaires gather on a private island to solve the world's problems. Chapters from Victoria's point of view find her holed up in Joshua Tree, where she pursues the "Zone of Utmost Throb" (her term for a metaphysical space of inspiration for the next venture), and reflects on her husband's nature ("Guy was always supportive. Ever loyal. Deeply incurious. All the qualities one seeks in an ideal partner"). The jaunty tone and adroit prose carry the reader along, mostly making up for the plot's lack of momentum. It's a pithy send-up of one of Silicon Valley's most intriguing crimes. Agent: Marya Spence, Janklow & Nesbit Assoc. (Apr.)

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review

The spouse of a scandal-plagued entrepreneur drowns his sorrows at a Caribbean retreat. Chapman's second novel, following Riots I Have Known (2019), centers on Guy Sarvananthan, the son of Sri Lankan immigrants, a failed composer, and, as the story opens, the husband of a vanished wife, Victoria Stevens. Her kayak was found empty in San Francisco Bay and it looks like she's drowned, but Guy surmises that she's likely faked her death before word gets out that her startup, which claimed to have a cure for cancer, has come up empty. Rather than head west from New York to play-act as a concerned husband, he co-opts Victoria's invitation to the Quorum, a Davos-style masters-of-the-universe gathering on a private island owned by a Bezos-ian figure. From there, Chapman's novel becomes a satire of the ultrarich on two tracks. Chapters narrated by Victoria describe her escape to Joshua Tree, meticulously tracking her wellness and productivity while rationalizing her fraud. Guy, meanwhile, insinuates himself as a boozy, druggy habitue of the billionaire set, at least until Victoria's fraud is revealed ("I don't want to think about any problems," he says. "My goal is ruinous intake"). Which is to say that both of Chapman's leads are contemptible, if to a purpose: He means to expose how moral rot infects the 0.25 percent, mainly by showing how the gathering, ostensibly meant for the sake of organized, well-financed do-gooderism, degenerates into self-interested squabbling. But though he has a keen eye for the foibles of the new gilded age, Chapman has done his job almost too well--his efforts to make Guy a nuanced character (immigrant, artistically talented, skeptical) make his ultimate narcissism and blithe self-destructiveness all the more frustrating. Unlikable characters are fair game in fiction; abjectly, determinedly hollow ones are a tougher sell. A cutting, if frustrating, eat-the-rich yarn. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Chapter 1 The necessary breakthroughs did not occur within the expected or justifiable life cycle of the product." Guy received the text Thursday evening his time, late afternoon her time. He assumed it was meant for the company Slack. She had done this before: the dry nature of the missive, in addition to the formality of the grammar, contrasted with their clipped marital exchanges. Tonight was the Oxfam dinner, which V would have known. He replied with a question mark and drained his second flute. As a veteran of the gala circuit, he knew he had ten minutes to eat before interruption by glad-handers and chummy acquaintances. The tuna tartare was a sensorial affront, given the slides of West African children warped by malaria and wefted by malnutrition. At least next week's Robin Hood gala wouldn't stoop to a slideshow . Though the chatter at cocktails was that everyone was skipping Robin Hood. Booking Yo-Yo Ma so soon after the Drawing Center . . . Much too much Ma, and certainly not the mood. He took another bite and ignored the scolding voice-over by the model/actor/activist. Yet another ingenue embarrassed by their frictionless ascent. Roark Jefferson, seated to his left, pushed aside an untouched plate and sighed with glottal force. "The Drawing Center served steak. And they're on the ropes. This mess"--he mashed the fleshy pink ziggurat with a fork--"is just guilt made manifest by some aspirant more sous than chef." Guy loved Roark. To the manner born and, like a wizened character actor, a man one couldn't imagine ever being under fifty. He wore bespoke pinstripe and Charvet shirting, which did a reasonable job of directing the eye away from the splotched complexion of an overripe banana, and he adhered to outmoded WASP traditions like only wearing sneakers on the tennis court. His family had accrued their wealth the old-fashioned way--that is, passively, as rentier moguls. Roark expanded his modest inheritance of Harlem brownstones into a quiet fiefdom and, at the age when most handed over the reins, multiplied his fortune by repurposing shipping containers as stand-alone rooftop apartments. This expansion of the housing inventory earned praise from the mayor and urban studies think tanks. Since Roark could not patent the concept, he stockpiled the global supply of coupling hardware for the containers, which braced the weight transversely. (Roark often corrected people on this point: the containers did not sit on top of the building, but "athwart" it.) He had come out of the closet at seventy, which he celebrated with the establishment of an invitation-only cigar club in the Flatiron District: "Like the Yale club, but more selective." Roark leaned over as the slideshow closed with what sounded like fake Satie; the pat outro did not send one reaching for the pocketbook. "My boy," Roark said. "Did I see you at the Drawing Center? A week ago Friday." Guy remembered the invitation. It was either held in the same event space they were sitting in now--a former bank from the gilded age--or in the LES, at the other gilded-age bank-turned-event-space. "Couldn't make it," he said. "I Guggenheimed. We're an underwriter." "Well," Roark said. "That evening I had an insight I'd like to share. With an aesthete such as yourself." "A failed aesthete such as myself," Guy replied. His previous life fascinated the gala set. They lacquered his decades as a struggling composer with vicarious nostalgia. He didn't mind, was in fact grateful for how it assuaged his imposter syndrome after V's pole-vault up the tax brackets. And for how it assuaged other aspects: Guy was almost always the only Sri Lankan in the room, whether it was high school in suburban Minneapolis, conservatory in Philadelphia, or these august rooms. At fundraisers and dinners "In Honor Of" whomever he played the Good Time Charlie, improvising cocktails at the bar (the Ironclad Prenup, the Bahama S-Corp) or tickling the ivories on someone's Steinway. His piano was barely passable, even to his atrophied ear, and would have been shameful at the old alma mater. But the gala set gave him the benefit of the doubt. As was their practice and default position. "'Failed,' come now." Roark waved away Guy's false modesty. "The flame still burns within. So I'm browsing the auction--decent to middling. Ho-hum Elizabeth Peyton, a rushed Henry Taylor. Nothing like 2005, when I picked up my Wiley for a song. It's in the Montauk place--have you been?" "To yours? Yes, the last lawn party." Guy disarmed the tuna with a third flute. He felt a tickle on his upper lip; a hair he'd missed shaving. "Of course, of course. Anyhow. I realized that none of my contemporary works depict our people." He opened his arm to indicate the room. "The same applies for cinema, literature, popular song." Guy leaned back in his chair. "You want more art about the affluent." From this angle, the long-stemmed calla lilies in the centerpiece appeared an extension of Roark's much-envied white pomp, amplifying the import of his speech and, when the uplights hit just so, giving the impression of a light bulb over his head. "More art by the affluent," Roark replied. "No more of this reportage, these outsiders' chronicles." "Aren't you writing your memoirs?" Roark didn't hear the question. "In our society, we value individual life by the measure of one's monetary reserve." He put a hand over his wineglass at a waiter's approach. "Why shouldn't the highest-valued individuals be the ones telling the stories?" "And they're not," Guy replied. "Not like before. Proust. Montaigne, Wharton. All writers of means." "De Sade, too," Guy said. "Didn't he torture sex workers?" "I'm not talking morality here--" "You guys are exactly right." A man with an oval, featureless head peered around the centerpiece. He looked to Guy like that optical illusion of a face that could be seen upside down, the bald head becoming the chin, forehead wrinkles as tightened lips. "Exactly right," the man continued. "Money is speech, after all, according to the highest court in the land. And we have the most speech!" Roark pointed his fork at the man. "Mind your manners, Saul. This is a private conversation." Guy was vaguely familiar. A hedge fundie who'd long grown accustomed to speaking without pushback or request for clarification and so felt comfortable with specious bullshit like "I'm socially liberal but fiscally conservative." As if there were any sphere of American life separate from money. They ignored him. "It's an intriguing idea," Guy said. He straightened and put his hand over his flute. "Implementation might be tricky." "I thought of that. It should arise organically, hmm? After all, we're people too." "We are people too. That is correct." Roark nodded toward the screen above the podium. The Jefferson Development Group's anodyne logo flashed in a row of platinum supporters ("Close Friends of Oxfam"). Guy waited a beat for PrevYou. He could look up how much V's advisory group recommended she donate. But he decided he didn't care and it didn't matter in the end. A six-figure fillip out of a ten-figure purse. Ah, there it was: Nice Friends of Oxfam. He hadn't adjusted to the new logo, despite its ubiquity on the portfolios and notepads around the Manhattan place. The semiabstract drawing hinted at a crustacean, in the style of a single-stroke Picasso, which the consultant from Wolff Olins praised as "no-brow universalism." V had to connect the dots for Guy: "Crab, cancer. You don't get it?" Even when he saw the logo projected in Times Square to celebrate the Series H investment round--the squiggle floating above phrases like "from chaos, order" and "benign is divine"--Guy always saw it as purely gastrointestinal. Roark folded his napkin and set it on his plate. "I'm retiring for the evening. Will I see you at Averman's?" "Victoria might attend. I don't think I can tag along." "Quite right. One invite per capita, no assistants, no partners. Which, given the holiday weekend, seems a bit strict." V had mentioned Arthur Averman's conference before she left for California. She made it sound onerous, though she considered all nontransactional gatherings on par with jury duty. "Enjoy answering all the big questions," Guy said. "Saturday I'm being fêted by the Brooklyn Phil." Roark pulled a coat check ticket from his breast pocket. Given the weather, Guy wondered if the man had checked an umbrella, despite arriving by car. "I hadn't realized the outer boroughs supported their own philharmonics," Roark said. "Well, good evening." Guy thought of sticking around. See if anyone was up for a cognac in the semisecret lounge off the rear staircase. Then he remembered Averman's advice during the First Flush, nearly a decade ago: Don't stay too late, it looks desperate. Don't act like you won't have it next year. You will. You deserve it. You always have. Excerpted from The Audacity by Ryan Chapman All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.