BookBrowse Reviews Who Is Rich? by Matthew Klam

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A provocative satire of love, sex, money, and politics.

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Who is Rich? For one thing, he's a self-absorbed, middle-aged, mediocre white twit. Worse, he's an unreliable narrator. But then again, as he reminds us, there's no such thing as a reliable narrator anyway. The odds are certainly stacked against Rich as we dive into this captivating novel. Quite frankly, at first, I was convinced I was going to finish this story hating the spineless cretin. But here's the reason why you should read it: I didn't hate him — and you won't either.

It is a testament to Matthew Klam's biting writing that Who is Rich? is so absorbing and that the reader develops a soupçon of sympathy for its wayward protagonist. Once an indie superstar, Rich now has his best days as a comic artist squarely in the rearview mirror. "I'd been so full of promise, so amazed to have graduated from the backwater of fanzines and college newspapers to mainstream publishing. I had an appointment with destiny, I'd barely started, then I blinked and it was over," Rich recalls.

And while the blank page is the bane of many an artist's existence, Rich lays the weight of his blame elsewhere: on his marriage to Robin and life with two young kids. Worse, he points out, "There were moments when I too somehow failed to understand my place in the world or see what lay ahead, when I thought my own good luck would never end, when I mistook the work I did for a skill that builds on itself. I had years where money dropped from the sky, but also disappointments, broken dreams, ill-advised spending on copper saucepans and breathable raingear, troubles with the IRS, and a house we owned whose value had dropped below what we owed the bank."

So he does that most predictable of things to recharge his boring stalled life — he indulges in an affair at an annual summer arts conference where he teaches. Last year Amy O'Donnell, a married student, was just the ego boost Rich needed and as the novel opens, he is looking forward to a similar adrenaline rush this season.

Rich knows Amy is all wrong for him, especially because she is from money — lots of money. Some of the best scenes are set in Amy's spectacularly appointed mansion in a Connecticut suburb. Even the hardiest champions of anti-consumerism won't be able to resist Klam's voluptuous descriptions of Amy's material riches such as a "bright white sofa as long as a Greyhound bus" and a four-year-old's bedroom "the size of a bowling alley."

While the plotline of "middle-aged man in crisis has an affair" might be a yawn-inducing proposition, Klam's positioning of Amy as having the leverage of her wealth in their relationship is an ingenious touch that gives the story the necessary twist to make it engaging. In that sense, the novel is a much more telling statement about class than it is about an illicit dalliance. "The power of her money made almost any interaction disorienting, manifesting in feverish insecurity," Rich says. "I had no zany fundraising stories to share. I felt shaky and middle-class. I had brains and an education and was not lazy but maybe worse than lazy, barely scraping by, donating twenty dollars here and there to the charity of my choice, while the super-powered people saved the world."

It's almost comical that even in his affair, Rich gets the rougher end of the bargain. As a broke artist desperately struggling to pay his bills, he sometimes drools more over Amy's husband's earnings (at 120 million dollars, it's more than the GDP of the Marshall Islands, he points out) than about her physical charms. There are plenty of times, though, when Rich's laments feel endless and unearned especially because his "problems" are so often of his own making.

Saturated with luscious descriptions of a small-town New England seaside resort (which sometimes reads very much like Provincetown, see Beyond the Book), this is a story about life and love and class. It's about marriage and careers, the mazes we get stuck in — and the people we lean on to get us safely to harbor. So the question of significance becomes not whether Rich will continue his affair with Amy this summer, it is whether he will take charge of his rudderless life and get it together again.

It takes quite a bit of writing muscle to create a readable novel based on an oft-told story about middle-aged ennui. But Klam pulls it off. Rich might be a self-absorbed, mediocre twit but he sure can knit one entertaining yarn.

This review was originally published in The BookBrowse Review in September 2017, and has been updated for the August 2018 edition. Click here to go to this issue.