Recommending: The Novels of Ryan Chapman

A great satirist who is only getting started.

Apr 21, 2024

When it comes to recommending books I do not kid myself that I have even a fraction of the influence of an Oprah, Reese, or Jenna, the book recommending colossi of today. I’m sure I even lack the juice of other celebrity book recommenders (Dakota Johnson, Emma Roberts, and Sarah Michelle Gellar among them), but I like to think my endorsements carry at least a little weight.

More importantly, taking the time to champion work that I think is great and which deserves more attention makes me feel good. My platform may be no bigger than a soapbox, but it’s mine. I also appreciate that at this joint and in the Chicago Tribune I’m provided the space to explore what I am championing in a way that is hopefully illuminating to readers, but again because I’m thinking of myself today, is primarily involving for me. I take something that is interesting to me and get to spend some time figuring out why it’s of interest.

(This is the reason I’m champion of viewing writing as “thinking,” and believe we need to give students as much practice with this thinking - as opposed to regurgitating - as possible.)

Anyway, this is a probably too long prelude to the writer and books I want to champion this week. The writer is Ryan Chapman and the books are the recently released The Audacity and 2019’s Riots I Have Known.

I’ve written in the past how there’s a good chance that your absolute favorite book has something like a three-star average on Amazon because this tends to reflect a polarized response. The “best” books are not meant for everybody because individuals are not averages. I looked at the ratings for both of Chapman’s novels, and indeed, he’s just above the three-star threshold, with low rated reviews that betray confusion, and five-star reviews that demonstrate deep appreciation for Chapman’s gifts.

I am in the five-star group.

The reason his work is polarizing is because Chapman is a full-bore satirist who works in a blend of the Juvenalian and Menippian modes, which makes his books funny, but also caustic and judgmental, an exercise in mostly destructive criticism.

The Juvenalian strain shows up in the way Chapman zeroes in on social and political structures. In Riots I Have Known this includes both the U.S. prison industrial complex and the insular world of the creative writing industry. The way Chapman achieves this is by channelling the novel through the perspective of an unnamed narrator who is holed up in a prison media center as a riot swirls outside is inner sanctum.

The narrator is the editor of the breakout literary journal, The Holding Pen, a journal of writing from incarcerated persons that has become a hit among the New York literati, but which has also triggered the riot because of disputes over its content.

The Menippian strain shows up in what is essentially an extended monologue in which the narrator moves from thought to thought, free associating his way subject to subject. The structure of the novel is dictated by the escalating severity of the riot, which occasionally interrupts the monologue, signaling that an end is inevitable, but you wouldn’t confuse this progress with a plot.

Chapman’s disinterest in plot is simultaneously my favorite thing about his work and what appears to be the chief source of frustration for those who do not connect with his novels. You are given access to the mind and voice of another and asked to simply experience that journey with them.

Chapman is committed to his work as a satirist, and because of this, the arc of the stories are not neat. We cannot expect characters to progress or grow or reveal some wisdom of the world.

Don’t get me wrong, Riots I Have Known is hugely entertaining. Some of the individual riffs are brilliant in terms of the sharpness of their observations and the life and rhythm of Chapman’s prose. But if you’re looking for a book that provides a journey towards enlightenment, Riots I Have Known will prove hugely frustrating.

The Audacity is clearly drawn from the recent implosion of blood testing fraud Theranos, and the life of disgraced and now imprisoned CEO Elizabeth Holmes. The Holmes stand-in is Victoria Stevens, founder of PrevYou, public booths (like large phone booths) which simultaneously deliver health care interventions and collect reams of information which is mean to inform a data-driven approach to curing cancer. PrevYou is a fraud, and Victoria has disappeared in a solo kayaking incident just before the fraud is to be publicly revealed, leaving behind her husband Guy Sarvananthan, a once semi-promising, but now failed composer who immigrated to America from Sri Lanka as a child.

Guy, the book’s central character, knows that Victoria has not killed herself (as some suspect) but is instead hiding out somewhere trying to brainstorm her way out of the predicament. At a loss, Guy decides to stand-in for Victoria at a planned island retreat called the Quorum, where billionaires who have accepted something like the giving pledge (to divest themselves of their enormous wealth), are gathering together to decide what large-scale societal problem they are going to put all this money toward solving.

The irony of the Quorum is thick in that while these billionaires have pledged to use their money for the societal good, they alone - or rather together at a luxury retreat on a private island - will decide what their money should be used for. Even in their “charity” they will dictate the direction of the world.

Chapman cites John Carreyrou (Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup) and Anand Giridharadas (Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World), among others for informing The Audacity, and the big picture indictment of the hubris, the thin skin, the utter pointlessness of immense wealth, is all directly on target.

The Audacity alternates long chapters from Guy’s point of view at the Quorum gathering with shorter dispatches from Victoria, who has indeed faked her disappearance and has holed up in a remote patch of desert as she tries to enter “Within the Zone of Ultimate Throb” a condition achieved through a series of punishing long distance runs meant to bring her to the brink of death.

Victoria has convinced herself that if she can enter the zone, a path out of implosion of PrevYou will announce itself, but from our first contact with her we understand this is a delusion. Victoria is beyond saving. Her chapters are brief, and Chapman uses them to map a kind of delusion which destroys both the wealthy and powerful individual as well as all those who find themselves in that person’s orbit.

This includes Guy, who has been essentially recruited by Victoria to be a public helpmeet, the public face of a charitable foundation funded by PrevYou. Guy grew up poor after his father died suddenly almost immediately after immigrating. He managed to graduate from a semi-prestigious music academy that could have been a springboard to a life of security, but wasn’t because of Guy’s lack of talent, or ambition, or some mix of both. Struck not by Victoria per se, but by the life being with Victoria would provide, Guy gladly accepts the gifts of their partnership, the money, the multiple properties, the parties, the freedom of never having to worry about material matters.

The exposure of the fraud will bring all of it crumbling down, but first Guy will enjoy one last weekend among the ultra-wealthy and (hopefully, from his perspective) kill himself in the process. One of the chief things I appreciate about Chapman’s work is that while we will get very close to Guy and come to understand both his past and present, at no time does the book ask us to extend our sympathy to the character.

Understanding, yes, but sympathy no. This does not mean some readers won’t feel sympathy for Guy, but Chapman’s approach is decidedly unsentimental. The emotion we experience is on us. He isn’t going to feed it to the reader.

I really appreciated the bravery and purity of this approach because it’s something I was too chicken to pursue for my satirical novel (The Funny Man). I had the notion that if I couldn’t figure out how to make the character “likable” I would have a tougher time finding an audience, but I think the satire in the novel - the strongest parts of the book - suffered for it. I wish I had committed to the extent Chapman manages in The Audacity.

Chapman’s satire is destructive when it comes to the status quo without feeling obliged to put an affirmative case in its place. That isn’t the work of satire. As the novel reaches its end, Guy imagines the lives he could have had:

Perhaps he never meets Victoria. He stays in Philly. Continues the piano lessons and mostly keeps to himself. Eventually, he gives up liquor, makes a case of Schuykill Punch last a month. The then tutoring dries up. A temp gig as an office manager becomes permanent. He’s set up with a coworker’s sister. They date, move in together, and marry. He gives her however many kids he wants. They move for her job, buy a house, support the local orchestra. At dinner parties he impresses their friends with his curry and hoppers. Myocardial infarction while mowing the lawn.

Guy is incapable of imagining a life of exercising agency over his own desires because he has none. The world he inhabits makes no room for them. We are meant to see that Guy’s world is our world. He is a negative example without a positive alternative. The billionaires of the Quorum may have an animating drive in the pursuit of wealth, but they are also mostly miserable. Victoria’s destiny is to destroy herself.

Chapman’s commitment to destructive criticism is clearly going to alienate some readers who simply don’t cotton to any satire that doesn’t stick to the gentle ribbing of the Horatian mode, but to me, reading Chapman’s work is a thrill and I hope he has many more novels ahead of him.

Links

This week at the Chicago Tribune I explore Adam Gopnik’s slim new book that explores the differences between achievement and accomplishment, All That Happiness Is. At my education-focused newsletter, Engaged Education, I look at how important it is to give students something interesting to write about so they can build productive attitudes toward writing.

Here’s good news for readers,

Maris Kreizman

is relaunching The Maris Review. I’m certain good stuff is coming.

I was fascinated by this interview of Salman Rushdie about his new book, Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder, by Terry Gross on the Fresh Air Program.

The New York Public Library has announced the nominees for its Young Lions award given to writers under 35 years of age. I’m old enough now I no longer feel envy for those who are nominated because of their nomination, but rather because of the simple fact of their youth.

Bookforum has returned with a vengeance. They recently had a certain takedown review go viral, but I’m going to point you towards

Christian Lorentzen

’s perceptive review of Vinson Cunningham’s Great Expectations.

Spot on literary humor from McSweeney’s this week “Is It a Red Flag (Jane Eyre Edition)?” by Amy Greenlee.

Recommendations

1. On Rotation by Shirlene Oduobi
2. The Wisteria Society of Lady Scoundrels by India Holton
3. Shrines of Gaiety by Kate Atkinson
4. True Biz by Sara Novic
5. Great Circle by Maggie Shipstead

Sarah M. - Los Angeles, CA

The pick for Sarah is Heat & Light by Jennifer Haigh a novel that puts specific people in a very specific place, and mines the interesting drama that comes out of that juxtaposition.

1. The Death of the Heart by Elizabeth Bowen
2. The Lonely Londoners by Sam Selvon
3. Tom Lake by Ann Patchett
4. The Disappearance by Philip Wylie
5. Never a Lovely So Real: The Life and Work of Nelson Algren by Colin Asher

Becca Y. - Fes, Morocco

For Becca I’m recommending a novel I mentioned a few newsletters back, Dem by William Melvin Kelley.1

A bit of an afternoon edition this week because I’ve been on a mini-trip with some friends and I was having too much fun yesterday to sit down and write. Today it is raining and dreary and I was very grateful to have a reason to sit down and write.

Until next time…

JW
The Biblioracle

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