The Despicable Rich

Today, it is a truth universally acknowledged that anyone in possession of a great fortune must be despicable in one way or another. At least, that’s how the fictional rich are portrayed in movies, television, and novels. As for the actual rich, there are enough bad actors among them to provide an endless stream of media stories demonstrating human nature at its worst. While I see no conspiracy, I do suspect an implicit “deal.”  Great inequality can be allowed to persist as long as popular envy is blunted by the idea that being rich is no guarantee against failed lives.

The surefire way to transmute envy into schadenfreude is to focus on dysfunctional families of the rich. So it can be a therapeutic relief to be a voyeur into the familial failures of the wealthy, fictional or real. This relief is something not at all new to our current times. ¹

What prompted me to write this post was my recent read of my favorite new novel of the year, Emma Cline’s “The Guest.” It’s set in the Hamptons and follows Alex, a 22 year-old call girl, scratching and clawing to survive the end of the Hamptons summer. It’s Labor Day week and, like a twisted version of Odysseus, Alex must use her wiles to confront a cavalcade of vapid, foolish, unhappy rich people.

Alex as the protagonist is a true original and to Cline’s credit I still can’t decide how to feel about her. The rest of the characters represent familiar tropes, no matter how well sketched. The late middle-aged men who use young girls as arm-candy, the mostly absent father and his resentful, mentally ill son, the personal assistants appended at the whip-end of the whims of their masters and mistresses, the aging women with obsessively exercised slim legs struggling to appear decades younger (at least from a distance), the house-sharing, declasse twenty-somethings, and the obligatory unsupervised, privileged teenagers doing drugs and hooking up. At the grown-up parties we attend as literary guests of Alex, we listen to snatches of dull conversation dominated by the meme of “how beautiful it is out here.”

In other words, “The Guest” is guaranteed to confirm for readers all the stereotypes about the Hamptons. And it will confirm to those who do not “summer” there, whether by choice or budget, that they are hardly missing out, but instead have dodged a bullet.

As for those of us who do spend time out there, I guarantee that many of us will buy and read (or claim to have read) this book. And I equally guarantee that we will all say, “That’s not me at all! That’s not the Hamptons I know! I’d never say things like that or even think them.” And while I might claim the same, there are a few passages that struck home. Both because they’re so well written and because they’re true. And because in fact while I read them, I nodded along.

Alex’s fifty something boyfriend brings her to a dinner party at one of those rare, magical houses perched high enough above the ocean so that her view

“…was only water, flat and silvered, appearing to stretch from the edge of the terrace to the hot-pink line of the horizon. What would it be like to live here, to occupy this unfettered beauty every day? Could you become used to the shock of water? The envy acted like adrenaline in Alex’s body, a swift and enlivening rush to the head. It was better, sometimes, to never know certain things existed.”

Here's Alex a few days later sitting outside at another estate, this one with expansive, pristine lawns and gardens. She’s gained entry through false pretenses. She hears a leaf blower and a lawn mower and watches the ceaseless circuit of a man removing garbage.

“So much effort and noise required to cultivate this landscape, a landscape meant to invoke peace and quiet. The appearance of calm demanded an endless campaign of violent intervention.”

Finally, here’s Alex’s thoughts about the twenty-something house-share people she meets.

“They would leave here Monday night, imagining they had gotten close to something, had some rarified experience. The truth was that the world they imagined would never include them.”

Emma Cline did not invent the rich people who populate her book. They undoubtedly exist. But I don’t think they’re in the majority. I wonder what would happen if the modern rich were portrayed in a more balanced way, equally good or bad as any other class of people, except with the great, advantageous ease of life that wealth can provide. Would there then be an even greater outcry against inequality? Or, more to the point, would there be more of an impetus to take redistributive action.

Downton Abbey is an example of a balanced portrayal of the rich. Who could hate Lord Grantham? There are the Dickens novels populated by kindly rich benefactors to offset sinister aristocrats. But it’s hard for me to think of any recent, culturally influential work of fiction in any medium, set in our century, that portrays the rich in a flattering way.

Perhaps such a work would be a complete commercial flop.

I suppose I’m musing about whether in a subtle, almost subliminal way attitudes toward inequality are softened by the preponderance of stories where the rich self-sabotage themselves into unhappy or even tragic circumstances. Could the schadenfreude produced by these stories be the modern equivalent of bread and circuses?

1.  A few thousand years ago, we had Oedipus killing his father, marrying his mother, and then, after realizing what he’s done, blinding himself. A little less on the nose (sorry, Sophocles), Shakespeare’s King Lear falls into enfeebled, impotent madness when he chooses the wrong daughters to trust. Then, as with many of the endings of the Tragedies, most of the characters die violent deaths.

Skipping centuries, “Succession” is an obvious and worthy modern heir of reveling in the misery of the rich. But “Succession” is also too “on the nose” and, as great as it was, it’s so over the top that the story of the rich Roys comes close, like Oedipus, to being mythological (a myth I will re-watch many times!)