The Privileges

The best thing about the Privileges, far and away, is the opening scene (which lasts for about the first 20% of the book, so not trivial) Dee opens on the wedding between two relatively normal people with big ambitions and focuses on their interactions with each other, their friends, their parents and their siblings. In this microcosm of their relationship, each character is nuanced and each interaction is deftly painted: the overbearing mother, the chronically late spoiled rich kid, the “alternative” step-sister who is SO over this. It's funny and relatable. (This scene deserves all the stars, so I'm going to keep this a three star review, instead of two, which is what the rest of the book deserves.)

And then...it's like when you meet someone and you have this great conversation with them and you have so much in common and you imagine this entire friendship spreading out before you, but then the next time you get together they spout vaguely offensive views and only want to talk about football and you realize you don't actually have anything in common? The first amazing scene is what makes the rest of the lackluster book hurt so much. Because everything else is lackluster. It's not bad, certainly, but it's just boring. Flat as paper characters wander around their super rich life, with their super perfect marriage to each other. And as much as there's no characterization, there's not really plot either. Yes, things happen, but they aren't related to each other and they result in no change upon the flimsy characters. Dee is trying to make a point about wealth and all of his characters and plot are servants to his point.

This book is basically a fable about wealth, but it's not even clear to me what point about wealth Dee is trying to make. There's the disaffected rich girl and the boy who's rich but want's to be a Trustafarian and then the rich woman who devotes her time to charities, but apparently earnestly so, and the rich man who maybe cheated the system to get rich, but then the book implies later that he continued to get rich even after he stopped insider-trading. And there's a very short bit about the hypocrisy of supporting charities while getting rich off of factories in China, which was interesting, but only lasted about two paragraphs.


Finally, the last 20% made me want to tear my hair out. For no good reason that I can understand, Dee decides to intercut three different threads, for over 50 pages. Intercutting is a literary technique that can drive me crazy at the best of times, but intercutting that many scenes, which were totally unrelated for that long was a special sort of obnoxious. The intercuts came quickly enough that it was hard to get into any scene, and since there were three other stories to cut into, you lost all emotional resonance with the first one by the time you got back to it. (For the record, just to help emphasize the bizarreness, the threads were:

-the son becomes takes an art class, becomes involved with his TA, who is into outsider art; he becomes fascinated by outsider art; he eventually tries to meet an artist; he gets kidnapped; he escapes)
-the daughter goes to a nightclub and gets drunk. She gets picked up by some “EuroTrash” guys. They crash her parents beach house. They party and wreck the house. They drive home and get into a car crash. Her parents punish her by making her dad take her with him on his business trip to China. They go to China. They visit a factory and she thinks it's hypocritical that her dad invests in a factory in China (even though none of the real problems with Chinese labor are actually on view here – it seems to be a factory staffed exclusively by adults and teenagers, without any apparent bad labor conditions.)
-The mother's father is dying in a hospice. She's called by the father's girlfriend, whom she didn't know existed. She flies to Florida, where he is. She sits at his bedside. She pays the father's girlfriend to go away. The father eventually dies.

Now imagine reading those plots 3 to 4 pages at a time, separated by 10 pages of other stuff.

I know a few readers who gave up before the second chapter, and I can understand why. This is not quite a slow, intellectual novel but probably not a beach read. I enjoyed it, but the ending was so abrupt that I am now trying to remember whether I actually finished it! (I did.) It's certainly well crafted, but I think the focus on obscene wealth almost necessarily leaves the reader feeling empty.