The Audacity

January 15, 2024
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.

February 15, 2024
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.

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March 15, 2024
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.

COPYRIGHT(2024) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.