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Jonathan Dee

The Privileges: A Novel Hardcover – January 5, 2010

by Jonathan Dee (Author)

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3.3 on Goodreads

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Smart, socially gifted, and chronically impatient, Adam and Cynthia Morey are so perfect for each other that united they become a kind of fortress against the world. In their hurry to start a new life, they marry young and have two children before Cynthia reaches the age of twenty-five. Adam is a rising star in the world of private equity and becomes his boss's protégé. With a beautiful home in the upper-class precincts of Manhattan, gorgeous children, and plenty of money, they are, by any reasonable standard, successful.

But the Moreys' standards are not the same as other people's. The future in which they have always believed for themselves and their children—a life of almost boundless privilege, in which any desire can be acted upon and any ambition made real—is still out there, but it is not arriving fast enough to suit them. As Cynthia, at home with the kids day after identical day, begins to drift, Adam is confronted with a choice that will test how much he is willing to risk to ensure his family's happiness and to recapture the sense that the only acceptable life is one of infinite possibility.

The Privileges is an odyssey of a couple touched by fortune, changed by time, and guided above all else by their epic love for each other. Lyrical, provocative, and brilliantly imagined, this is a timely meditation on wealth, family, and what it means to leave the world richer than you found it.

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272 pages
Language

English
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Random House
Publication date

January 5, 2010
Dimensions

6.4 x 1.01 x 9.55 inches
ISBN-10

9781400068678
ISBN-13

978-1400068678
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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Dee's four prior novels (Palladio; etc.) cast an intelligent, calculating eye on the culturally topical, which sparked comparisons to the writings of Updike, DeLillo and Franzen. The wedding of Adam and Cynthia Morey, a young and charming couple who quickly expand into a brood of four, begins Dee's fifth. Adam and Cynthia's nuanced personalities and playful, sincere exchanges form the novel's empathic backbone as Adam begins to profit immensely from risky side ventures while working for a hedge fund. Dee establishes a trust with his readers that allows Adam's murky business ethics to escape the spotlight of outright moral scrutiny, and by showing how Adam endangers his privilege—while his children endanger their own lives—Dee reveals how risk is a kind of numbing balm. April, Adam's daughter, responds to the boredom of material comfort by resorting to drug-induced self-effacement. The novel climaxes as the children face the possibility of their own death, though lucidity after mortal danger is fleeting: I can feel myself forgetting what it feels like to feel, April says. Dee notably spurns flat portraits of greed, instead letting the characters' self-awareness and self-forgetfulness stand on their own to create an appealing portrait of a world won by risk. (Jan.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

In his previous four novels, Dee has dramatized peculiarly American forms of absurdity and moral bankruptcy with search-and-destroy precision and calculated understatement. That approach serves him well in this ensnaring tale of alienating wealth, in which Dee breaks fresh artistic ground with the sheer beauty and quiet poignancy of his prose. Picture-perfect and ferociously confident and ambitious Adam and Cynthia marry right out of college and quickly have children, April and Jonas. Adam excels at a private equity firm in Manhattan, but, impatient for the big money, he also launches a high-stakes insider-trading venture. The gleaming Moreys become so impossibly rich they don’t seem quite human to others, and, of course, money doesn’t preclude suffering. Dee deftly avoids cliché as Adam and Cynthia go against type by being fiercely loyal to each other, April takes desperate risks, and Jonas, the brightest and most creative of the clan, embarks on an inquiry into outsider art that lands him in a strange and terrifying predicament. A suspenseful, melancholy, and acidly funny tale about self, family, entitlement, and life’s mysteries and inevitabilities. --Donna Seaman

Review

"The Privileges is verbally brilliant, intellectually astute, and intricately knowing. It is also very funny and a great, great pleasure to read. Jonathan Dee is a wonderful writer."—Richard Ford

"Here is an incredibly readable, intelligent, incisive portrait of a particular kind of American family. Jonathan Dee takes us inside the world of what desire for wealth can do, and cannot do, for the self, the soul, and the family. The Privileges is told with admirable conciseness and yet with great breadth, and the reader is swept along, watching the complications of such desire unfold."—Elizabeth Strout

"The Privileges is an intimate portrait of a wealthy family that gradually becomes an indictment of an entire social class and historical moment, while also providing a window onto some recent, and peculiarly American, forms of decadence. Jonathan Dee is at once an acerbic social critic, an elegant stylist, and a shrewd observer of the human comedy."—Tom Perrotta

"The subjects of money and class are seldom tackled head-on by our best literary minds, which is one of the reasons that Jonathan Dee'sThe Privileges is such an important and compelling work. The Privileges is a pitch-perfect evocation of a particular stratum of New York society as well as a moving meditation on family and romantic love. The tour de force first chapter alone is worth the price of admission." —Jay McInerney

"Mr. Dee has given us a cunning, seductive novel about the people we thought we'd all agreed to hate. His case study of American mega-wealth is delicious page by page and masterly in its balancing of sympathy and critical distance." —Jonathan Franzen

"Ensnaring tale of alienating wealth, in which Dee breaks fresh artistic ground with the sheer beauty and quiet poignancy of his prose. A suspenseful, melancholy, and acidly funny tale about self, family, entitlement, and life’s mysteries and inevitabilities."—Booklist

"Dee notably spurns flat portraits of greed, instead letting the characters' self-awareness and self-forgetfulness stand on their own to create an appealing portrait of a world won by risk."—Publishers Weekly, starred review

"Thoughtful and bracingly unpredictable"—Kirkus

"Dee’s luminous prose never falters; he’s a master"—Entertainment Weekly

"Scintillating. . .Dee is a remarkably skilled portraitist with a rare talent for rendering his characters’ points of view with deep empathy."—Washington Post

"A transfixing account of the rise and rise of a ‘charmed couple.’ . . . Composed in Dee's typically elegant style -- gorgeous, winding sentences."—Los Angeles Times

"Dee moves from scene to scene like a cinematographer, capturing the essence of a character in a telling glimpse."—Financial Times

"Dee is a writer of skill and emotional depth. His latest, The Privileges, should catapult him to darling status—deservedly. . . . an electric, funny, tragic, loving tale."—Time Out NY

"Graceful, articulate and perceptive, and often hilariously funny...Dee's lively shimmering prose illuminates wonderfully observed dystopian moments...[his] writing is so full of elegance, vitality and complexity...at once funny, subversive and sympathetic."—New York Times Book Review

"Dee has a great eye for detail, physical and emotional, and invites us to watch with eyes wide open as the Morey family sails past disaster into a future most people—until they read about such matters in novels as good as this -- would think they would like to inhabit."—NPR

"A deliciously sophisticated engine of literary darkness."—The Guardian

"The novel goes down like a perfectly chilled glass of champagne—crisp, sparkling and delicious."—Bookforum

"Lucidly written and with a pitch-perfect ear for contemporary mores and dialogue, The Privileges is entertaining—and morally ambiguous."—Economist

"[The Privileges] blends social commentary with psychological exploration…Dee has a gifted essayist’s way with a phrase."—Seattle Times

"Dee is a seamless writer…[he] never mocks his characters or subverts their charms…[which] separates The Privileges from other novels that mine the same shimmering urban terrain."—Philadelphia Inquirer

"[Dee] adeptly penetrates the mindset of these relentlessly narcissistic characters...[His] discerning portrayal of their inner lives keeps the pages turning.—BookPage

"Captivating [and] shrewdly realistic." —Salon.com

"Striking the right note for our times, Dee precisely captures the unethical world of a Manhattan hedge-fund manager, his disaffected daughter, and the glittering dangers of success."—Daily Beast

"Dee notably spurns flat portraits of greed, instead letting the characters' self-awareness and self-forgetfulness stand on their own to create an appealing portrait of a world won by risk."—Publishers Weekly, starred

About the Author

Jonathan Dee is the author of four novels, most recently Palladio. He is a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine, a frequent contributor to Harper's, and a former senior editor of The Paris Review. He teaches in the graduate writing programs at Columbia University and the New School.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter One

A wedding! The first of a generation; the bride and groom are just twenty- two, young to be married these days. Most of their friends flew in yesterday, and though they are in Pittsburgh, a city of half a million, they affect a good- natured snobbish disorientation, because they come from New York and Chicago but also because it suits their sense of the whole event, the magical disquieting novelty of it, to imagine that they are now in the middle of nowhere. They have all, of course, as children or teenagers, sat through the wedding of some uncle or cousin or in quite a few cases their own mother or father, so they know in that sense what to expect. But this is their first time as actual friends and contemporaries of the betrothed; and the strange, anarchic exuberance they feel is tied to a fear that they are being pulled by surrogates into the world of responsible adulthood, a world whose exit will disappear behind them and for which they feel proudly unready. They are adults pretending to be children pretending to be adults. Last night’s rehearsal dinner ended with the overmatched restaurant manager threatening to call the police. The day to come shapes up as an unstable compound of camp and import. Nine hours before they’re due at the church, many of them are still sleeping, but already the thick old walls of the Pittsburgh Athletic Club seem to hum with a lordly overenthusiasm.

Mid- September. Since Labor Day, the western half of Pennsylvania has been caught in a late and dispiriting heat wave. Cynthia wakes up in her mother’s house, in a bed she’s awakened in only five or six times in her life, and her first thought is for the temperature. She pulls on a t- shirt in case anyone else is awake, passes her burdensome stepsister Deborah (never Debbie) sleeping in flannel pajamas half on and half off the living room couch, and slides open the door to the deck, from which she can see in the distance a few limp flags on the golf course at Fox Chapel. Cool, tolerably cool anyway, though it’s still too early to tell anything for sure. It can’t even be seven yet, she thinks. Not that she’s worried. The specter of her bridesmaids holding beer bottles to their foreheads to cool off, or of Adam wiping the sweat out of his eyes as he promises himself to her, only makes her smile. She’s not the type to fold if things don’t go perfectly; what matters most to her is that the day be one that nobody who knows her will ever forget, a day her friends will tell stories about. She turns and heads back indoors, past her own fading footprints in the heavy dew on the cedar planks of the deck.

She never imagined a wedding in Pittsburgh, because she never had any reason to imagine it until her mother remarried and moved out here two years ago. To the extent she’d pictured it at all, Cynthia had always assumed she’d be married back in Joliet Park: but in the middle of her last semester at Colgate she learned that her father had sold their old house there, in which he had not lived for a long time; and when she announced her engagement two months later her mother Ruth went off on one of her unpacifiable jags about Cynthia’s stepfather Warren being “a part of this family” and would not stand for any implication that this was less than entirely true. To force- march these outsize personalities back to the scene of the family’s dissolution in Joliet Park, to listen to them bitch over the seating chart and over old friends whose post- divorce allegiances were sometimes painfully ambiguous, was out of the question. It would have been a gruesome sort of nostalgia, and pointless at that. A wedding is rightfully about the future if it is about anything at all.

They could have married in New York—where Cynthia and Adam already shared an apartment—and in fact that was the arrangement Adam gently pushed for, on the grounds, typically male, of maximum simplicity. But the truth was that that wouldn’t have seemed unusual enough to Cynthia, too little distinct from a typical Saturday night out drinking and dancing with their friends, just with fancier clothes and a worse band. She wasn’t completely sure why the idea should appeal to her at all—the big schmaltzy wedding, the sort of wedding for which everyone would have to make travel plans—but she didn’t make a habit of questioning her wants. So Pittsburgh it was. Adam shrugged and said he only cared about making her happy; her father sent her a lovely note from wherever he was living now, implying that the whole idea had been his to begin with; and Warren expressed himself by opening up his checkbook, a consequence, to tell the truth, of which Cynthia had not been unmindful.

She tiptoes past the couch to avoid waking Deborah, because waking her might cause her to speak, and on one’s wedding day there are some trials one ought to be spared. They don’t know each other that well, but little things about Deborah excite Cynthia’s derision as though they have lived together for years. The flannel pajamas, for instance: she is two years older than Cynthia but so congenitally chilly that she and Ruth might as well be roommates at the old folks’ home. The house was bought with a second life in mind, a life in which the children were grown and gone, which explains why there is only one spare bedroom. Though the couch looks gratifyingly uncomfortable, Cynthia considered a campaign to pack Deborah off to the Athletic Club with all the other guests, so that her maid of honor and best friend, Marietta, could stay at the house instead. But family obligations are perverse. It makes no sense at all that this palpably hostile sexless geek should be one of her bridesmaids, and one of Cynthia’s many close friends’ feelings hurt as a result; yet here she is.

In the kitchen Ruth, Cynthia’s mother, whose last name is now Harris, is drinking a cup of tea standing up, in a green ankle- length bathrobe she holds closed at the neck. Cynthia passes her and opens the refrigerator without a word. “Warren’s out,” Ruth says, in answer to a question it would not occur to Cynthia to ask. “He went to get you some coffee. We only keep decaf in the house, so he went out specially for you.”

Cynthia scowls at the effrontery of decaf coffee, a fetish of the old and joyless. Tossing a loaf of bread on the counter, she stands on tiptoe to search the cupboard where she remembers the ancient jams are kept; then, feeling her mother’s gaze, she turns her head to look back over her shoulder and says, “What?”

It’s the underwear: the fact that she is parading around in it, but also the underwear itself, the unhomeliness of it, the fact that her daughter has grown into a woman whom it pleases to spend a lot of money on underwear. Shameless is the word for it. All Ruth wants is a little gravitas for today of all days, a proper sense of nervousness or even fear, which she might then think of some way to allay. One last moment of reliance. But no: it became clear weeks ago that all this was no rite of passage into womanhood for her daughter— it’s a party, a big party for her and all her friends, and she and Warren are just there to pick up the tab. For the last six or eight years, nearly every sight of her daughter has caused a certain look to cross Ruth’s face, a look of just- you- wait, though the question “wait for what?” is not one she could answer and thus she keeps her mouth shut. The flatness of Cynthia’s stomach, the strength and narrowness of her hips, more than anything the way she carries herself with such immodesty in a body whose nearness to the modern ideal is bound to provoke an unpredictable range of response: self- satisfied women are often brought low in this world, and for years now, mostly by frowning, Ruth has tried to sneak her insights onto the record.

But she reprimands herself; today, no matter who cares to deny it, is not just any day. She feels the faint echo of her own terror in the hours before her first wedding, a terror that was partly sexual, which counts as a bond between them even though her daughter’s sexuality is a subject she has long since lost the fortitude to go near. “So,” she says, trying for a conciliatory tone. “This is your special day.” And Cynthia turns around, mouth open, and laughs—a laugh Ruth has heard before, the only solace for which is a retreat into memories of when her only child was a baby.

Behind them, the digital clock on the microwave blinks silently to seven- thirty. In the living room, Deborah, having woken herself with her own snoring, makes a little groaning sound that no one hears and pushes her face deeper into the gap between the cushions and the sofa back. At the Athletic Club, the weekend desk clerk consults the computer printout in her hand and dials the extension for Adam’s room. She’s seen the Daily Events schedule and recognizes his name as that of the groom; to the scripted wake- up greeting at the top of the printout she adds best wishes of her own, because she saw him last night and he’s cute.

“Thanks,” Adam says, and hangs up. He too goes straight to the window to check the weather. His ...

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ 1400068673
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Random House; First Edition (January 5, 2010)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 272 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 9781400068678
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1400068678
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.05 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.4 x 1.01 x 9.55 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #2,086,633 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #17,929 in Family Saga Fiction
- #83,773 in Literary Fiction (Books)

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Jonathan Dee

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Jonathan Dee is the author of seven novels, including The Locals, A Thousand Pardons, and The Privileges, which was a finalist for the 2011 Pulitzer Prize. A recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, he teaches in the graduate writing program at Syracuse University.

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Tania M.

There's no free lunch

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on August 15, 2011

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I had read some of the reviews of this book, before deciding to read it. I was left with a strong negative impression of the main characters--which, in the two days it took me to finish reading the novel, I had trouble pinpointing. I know people like the Moreys, the husband and wife Adam and Cynthia. They are people whose lack of sentimentality and refusal to dwell in uncomfortable memories of disempowerment and loss are not so much a concentrated effort that is a result of deep reflection, but a practical, get-on-with-it attitude to life that is greatly effective in securing the kind of life most wish to have. It is interesting that people would rather forgive adulterous men who do 'good' in public, yet are harsh on Adam Morey, whose sole focus in life is to be the best husband and father he can be to his much-cherished wife and children by providing limitless possibilities for them.

Jonathan Dee's Moreys represent the young, brash, no-looking-back, guilt-free America, whose vision of the future and its secure place in it has no relation with illusions or prayers or fate, but the simple fact of acting on its ideals and making it a reality today. As we should all be able to see by now, that modus operandi no doubt has affected everyone in its dust, but it doesn't reduce the purity of its intention; a particularly American creed.

If Adam Morey is an alcoholic instead of a dedicated athlete, if he is an abusive instead of a devoted husband, if he comes home with no 'bacon' instead of having more than anticipated and acted on his wife's needs and his family's, I wonder if my fellow reviewers would be more forgiving, and write things about him with descriptions like 'human', or 'deep and true' or, 'honest'? Have we become a society that is comfortable in sidling up with unforgivable weaknesses than what can be interpreted as strength of character? What kind of a society throws stones at those minding their own business living autonomous, self-sufficient, successful lives, when that exact society built the particular infrastructure for the realization of that particular life trajectory?

Yes, the Moreys exclude family members outside of their own nucleus -- the reminders of their disempowered past-lives. Dee doesn't venture to describe how both Cynthia and Adam come to this choice, apart from illustrating the alienating gap between their children and the children's grandparents that are jarring for both parties. Again, what kind of compromises is one willing to make for one's dreams? For the Moreys, in order to seize the big living they sought for themselves, they made the innate choice to leave behind all that would not sync with that vision. Adam is not guilty of being a 'sociopath'-- if the USA can be called a sociopath for wanting to spread democracy with such naïveté as, similarly, the Pile character believed he was doing in Graham Greene's The Quiet American--he just believed in the American Dream. His idea of being a righteous man is to do good by his family and staying loyal to that.

Dee's message is one that is deeply paradoxical and delivered in a deceptively economical manner. Are we guilty of being true to our dreams that does not seemingly hurt anyone and is for the good of the people we have vowed to take care of for the rest of our lives? As Candide had advised: cultivate our own garden; mind our own business, do our best to provide for those we care for, be true to them. Adam and Cynthia are devoted to each other their whole married lives, and have the kind of marriage all of us wish for: one that is filled with faith and support, true love and resilience, a lack of doubts and misgivings. Would we rather punish these characters for their tunnel vision, or those whose grasp of the big picture give license to their disloyalties towards those who trust them? How many 'humanitarian' individuals are ruthlessly indifferent to the emotional well-fare and general well-being of those closest to them?

The Moreys represent the naïve, seemingly carefree, beautiful and bold America. Historical baggage is one they've left at the altar; as in the novel, the beginning of the Moreys' lives start at their wedding very early in their lives. At the end of the novel, Dee portrays moments in which Adam and Cynthia respectively experience uncharacteristic self-reflection, triggered by loss and alienation. Both of them chuck their probing thoughts out the window before truly giving any time for the thoughts to take hold in their vigilantly-guarded sentiments. In this rejection of exploring possible (other) meanings of their lives, Dee depicts that the lives of the privileged are not as free from burden as we'd like to project in our envy or need to believe that they are different to 'us', or 'inhuman'. The burden of the success that the Moreys achieve, is the baggage of deciding not to carry any. Everything demands a compromise, and in America, one is free to make the compromises one chooses to live with.

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bookworm

Fascinating look at pursuit of money and power

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on June 29, 2015

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What are we to make of the Moreys? They are a "perfect" family on paper in some ways; loving, monogamous marriage; committed parents; tight little family circle. Generous with their wealth -- trying to do good in the world. Yet, they're also oblivious to everyone but themselves, often nasty, narcissistic, self-serving and arrogant. For me, this duality was iDee's genius in this very readable novel. In addition to being a really good writer -- with fresh turns of phrase and a penetrating eye for social detail -- he manages to construct what I think is a paean to modern greed and amorality, but within the confines of what otherwise feels like a conventional family story with characters you feel deeply ambivalent about. I found the story engrossing, not least because of his prose, but also frustrating. There are things to admire about these characters, as well as (many) things to dislike. Of course, that's true of most people, but it's exaggerated to a grand level here, perhaps because Adam and Cynthia won't settle for anything but a "big life." Is it possible to have a big life without obscene amounts of money? And does having that kind of money bring you a big life? These seem to be some of the questions Dee examines, without any kind of clear-cut denouement. Indeed, the "non-end" end shows us Jonas, certainly up to that point the most sympathetic character, planning to embed himself into the family money and life. What's the point of denial, after all.

At various points, I wondered if Dee were trying to find a doorway into the mind and motivation of a Bernie Madoff type individual -- a rationale for the risk-taking via Adam's need to "save" the woman he loves and who seems to be drifting away. Whether intended or not, it does provide interesting glimpses into another world, one both exciting and also quite sad. Read this as indictment of the .001% or a peek at their lives, but do read it.

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Top reviews from other countries

Walter M. Holmes

The American Dream

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on February 24, 2011

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The scene is set by a detailed and rather alarming description of an expensive wedding. To one who has no familiarity with such an occasion this seems almost anthropological in intent and it is a beautifully crafted method of introducing the characters and of defining their milieu. The happy young couple become Cynthia and Adam Morey.
The backbone of the novel is Adam's progress towards the top level of financial status. It seems that he plans to achieve this aim by cultivating those who can assist him, dropping them when necessary. We are told of his charm, which has to be taken on trust, and of his social skills. He is something of a fitness fanatic. He is, unlike Auden's intellectual, true to his wife. By early middle age he is supporting charities and has a private jet. He is a public figure.
We also follow the fortunes of daughter April and son Jonas at different stages of the twenty or so years that bring us up to date. Their father's financial success affects them but they are very different personalities and more interesting than their parents. The focus is shifted from time to time and the reader's interest and curiosity is maintained.
The numerous recommendations given by important authors suggest that this is no ordinary book. It may be no accident that Adam is rather a boring hero, committed as he is to goal. The novel certainly tackles an important current issue. Anyone who has seen the film "Inside Job" may think the author's perception a little too even handed. The novel it is a very enjoyable read written with style but, like Adam, it seems to lack certain warmth. It is rather as if Scott Fitzgerald had decided that Tom Buchanan should be the hero instead of Gatsby or that Dick Diver ought to turn out to be more of a winner than he did. And that comment is intended to imply that "The Privileges" is first class work, and consequently that it has to be assessed in the context of the best American fiction. The extent of ironical intent and the possibility of metaphor are topics for debate.

One person found this helpful

S. B. Kelly

Different and compelling

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on May 21, 2012

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Dee writes very well. I found myself underlining phrase after phrase in my Kindle because they were so well expressed.

It's hard to know what to say about the story. If Cynthia and Adam fell into a pile of manure, they would come up smelling of roses, and that ought to make them unsympathetic, but it doesn't. If you don't like two people who marry at the tender age of 22 and make their love last well into middle age, then you're a right old grouch.

The novel jumps forward in time with each chapter and there are few clues as to the era. I started off by assuming that the wedding was contemporary but soon realised that it must have taken place in the 80s. As in Jane Austen we are in a self-contained world and, as Austen doesn't mention the Napoleonic Wars, so Dee doesn't mention September 11th. Each chapter ends with a crisis of sorts but then we jump forward in time and that period of angst is forgotten which is, perhaps, a useful message.

The ending is unsatisfactory, but I assume that if it went on with another jump in time, all the characters' worries would, once again, have been resolved.

It's a short novel and a very easy read. I found it original and fascinating.

Roman Totale

feels like a synopsis

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on December 22, 2010

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really odd. the opening chapter is vivid, engaging. you're all set for a substantial novel, but the whole thing evaporates. you're hurtling across decades as the couple at the heart of it grow older and richer. it's a series of increasingly sketchy vignettes, without the dots joined and with the reader losing a grip on who these people are.

themes and possibly interesting plots get thrown in and left hanging. insider trading, adultery, drugs, outsider art. it's like the author feels it's enough to throw it in there without bothering to develop it.

you get 70 pages of a better, longer book and the remaining 200 pages of the writer phoning it in.

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Mrs R.

Hard going

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on January 28, 2018

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I found myself thoroughly enjoying the first half but found it hard to keep up with the se one half

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Boot-Boy

A Wrong Turn...

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on March 15, 2011

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This book came fêted with enthusiastic endorsements from the likes of Jonathan Franzen, Jay McInerney and The New York Times, the story of upwardly mobile Adam and Cynthia Morey taking on Manhattan and making it work for them. Interestingly, McInerney made the point in his review that the first chapter alone 'was worth the price of admission', all those wedding guests sweating it out in a Pennsylvanian heat wave. And he's right, that first chapter really is a great piece of work and persuaded me that I'd chanced upon a winner. The problem was that very gradually, after that marvellous start and some of the earlier set pieces, the story seemed to unravel. A hundred pages from the end, I began to suspect that Dee had lost his way - as I had - and fifty pages on I just knew I wasn't going to enjoy the ending - or quite understand what it was he was trying to say. And I didn't. It felt like a cop-out, as though Dee couldn't find the loose ends to tie up, and give his readers - this reader, at least - what they wanted. After such an encouraging and entertaining start his story just... took a wrong turn and ran out of steam. Having said all that, I'll give Dee the benefit of the doubt and count The Privileges a tiny glitch for a writer of obvious talent, a superior stylist and perceptive social observer who's probably going to make me eat my words with his next book.

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The Privileges: A Novel Hardcover – January 5, 2010

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Buy new:

$30.42

FREE delivery: Dec 27 - 28

Ships from: Amazon

Sold by: Nesta Trading

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