Novels that make fun of the rich

F. Scott Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda Sayre on a road-trip in his his 1918 Marmon automobile. (Image: Motor magazine via Wikimedia Commons)

The third season of Succession arrives next month, with further antics of characters scheming to control a media empire. The TV series is not alone in its take-no-prisoners attitude towards the affluent. There’s also The White Lotus, about insalubrious goings-on between guests and staff at a Hawaiian resort; and Nine Perfect Strangers, about the idiosyncrasies of those at a wellness spa.

Nine Perfect Strangers is based on a novel by Liane Moriarty, among those that satirise the lives of the rich. These works invite us to be both fascinated and repelled by what happens to those who slurp from the Money River to their heart’s content, as Kurt Vonnegut put it in God Bless You, Mr Rosewater.

It’s not simply voyeurism that makes people write (and read) about the well-to-do. Sometimes, it’s also an anthropological urge to train the lens on members of a class that could almost be an alien species.

“Let me tell you about the very rich,” as Scott Fitzgerald wrote in his short story, The Rich Boy. “They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand.”

This is the basis of an enduring anecdote about Fitzgerald commenting that the rich are different from us, with Hemingway replying: “Yes, they have more money”. The latter was so pleased with this quip that he worked it into a short story, The Snows of Kilimanjaro. In this somewhat bitter meditation, a writer reflects on his time among the wealthy: “You were really not of them but a spy in their country.”

Such spying and satirising aren’t new, of course. As critic Daphne Merkin has written, except for Henry James, “most nineteenth-century novelists—be they Balzac, Dickens or Dostoyevsky—have disdained their wealthy characters, tending to burden them with equal parts animal cunning and moral laxity”.

Later, others such as Edith Wharton cast a beady eye on the so-called Gilded Age. Across the Atlantic, Evelyn Waugh and Anthony Powell skewered the peccadilloes of another generation.

If the 1980s had Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities, with bond traders calling themselves Masters of the Universe and swaggering all over New York, the financial collapse of 2007-08 led to novels that dealt with, among other things, the conduct of the one percent.

Of these, in Adam Haslett’s Union Atlantic, a bank executive issues instructions for a new mansion: “If the neighbours have five bedrooms, give me six. A four-car garage, the kitchen of a prize-winning chef, high ceilings, marble bathrooms, everything wired to the teeth. Whatever the architecture magazines say. Make the envying types envious.”

During the same period, in Sebastian Faulks’s A Week in December, a British parliamentarian’s wife who used to think he was rich with a salary and bonus of a few million a year now realises that “by comparison he was a failure: relatively, they were almost broke”. In John Lanchester’s Capital, another banker assesses a painting from “aesthetic, art-historical, interior-design, and psychological points of view” and concludes that “it had cost forty-seven thousand pounds, plus VAT”.

At times, such works arise from a sense of indignation that’s almost savage. Such is the case with some writers from Asia and the subcontinent, notably Rahul Raina’s lacerating How to Kidnap the Rich. It’s driven by outrage that, as the narrator puts it, “could have made India the world’s leader in renewable energy”.

Others similarly deal with a rise to riches by means that are more foul than fair, reporting on the view from the top. There are sharp contrasts between classes that expose plutocratic posturing. Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger is an obvious example, as are Tash Aw’s Five Star Billionaire and Mohsin Hamid’s How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia.

Kevin Kwan’s work, on the other hand, can come across as a series of missives from an insider that contains as much exasperation as affection. In Crazy Rich Asians and the novels that follow, he sends up Southeast Asian billionaires and their overblown lifestyles. As one character says: “this crowd made Upper East Side girls look like Mennonites.”

With reports of the pandemic escalating the fortunes of the rich while crushing the poor and pushing the middle class into relative poverty, many more such novels seem likely. Mocking the system is one way of pointing out the need for change.

As for the reactions of the well-off, perhaps they’ll heed the words of Anthony Trollope in Barchester Towers: “Men in the upper walks of life do not mind being cursed, and the women, presuming that it be done in delicate phrase, rather like it.”