A provocative satire of love, sex, money, and politics that unfolds over four wild days in so-called “paradise”—the long-awaited first novel from the acclaimed author of Sam the Cat “I seriously, deeply love this book.”—Michael CunninghamNAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE NEW YORK TIMES AND THE WASHINGTON POST Every summer, a once-sort-of-famous cartoonist named Rich Fischer leaves … summer, a once-sort-of-famous cartoonist named Rich Fischer leaves his wife and two kids behind to teach a class at a weeklong arts conference in a charming New England beachside town. It’s a place where, every year, students—nature poets and driftwood sculptors, widowed seniors, teenagers away from home for the first time—show up to study with an esteemed faculty made up of prizewinning playwrights, actors, and historians; drunkards and perverts; members of the cultural elite; unknown nobodies, midlist somebodies, and legitimate stars—a place where drum circles happen on the beach at midnight, clothing optional.
Once more, Rich finds himself, in this seaside paradise, worrying about his family’s nights without him and trying not to think about his book, now out of print, or his future as an illustrator at a glossy magazine about to go under, or his back taxes, or the shameless shenanigans of his colleagues at this summer make-out festival. He can’t decide whether his own very real desire for love and human contact is going to rescue or destroy him.
A warped and exhilarating tale of love and lust, Who Is Rich? goes far beyond to address deeper questions: of family, monogamy, the intoxicating beauty of children, and the challenging interdependence of two soulful, sensitive creatures in a confusing domestic alliance.
LONGLISTED FOR THE CENTER FOR FICTION FIRST NOVEL PRIZE
“Funny, maddening . . . defiantly original . . . [Matthew] Klam’s prose is so clean, so self-assured, that it feels a little like a miracle.”—The New York Times
“A dazzling meditation on monogamy [and] parenthood . . . full of sound and fury and signifying pretty much everything.”—The Boston Globe
“Comic, wondrous, and sad.”—The New Yorker
“Almost scarily astute.”—People
“An electric amalgam of frustration and tenderness, wonder and rebellion: a paean to the obliterating power of parental love.”—Jennifer Egan
“A contemporary masterpiece.”—Salon
more
In Who is Rich?, Matt Klam (disclaimer: he’s a good friend of mine; reclaimer: I’d never say I loved a book I didn’t love) takes on the sinkhole of his missing years, the pain of his slow-motion flameout and what it turned him into, in what can only be called an act of heroic self-immolation. I get a little crazy when reading the customer reviews of the book on Amazon. A depressingly large number of readers see in the once-sort-of-famous cartoonist Rich Fischer, Matt’s narrator/stand-in, an entitled, whiny middled-aged white man who has no right to feel anything but privileged and fortunate (“Klam’s complaint festival” one calls it). Some of them accuse Matt of simply using the book to try and justify his having cheated on his wife (“A self-serving, self-centered man-boy”). A few even malign the writing itself (“sloppy, convoluted”). I suppose I can understand where reactions like these are coming from (I might call them “low-information readers”), the same way I can understand the anger and disappointment that led some people to vote for Donald Trump. But I can’t support the conclusions and am left with one thought only: They just don’t get it. Because it seems in this increasingly polarized world, people either do or they don’t. And if they don’t, nothing I say is gonna persuade them.
For everyone still with me, let me just say that what Matt has pulled off in his novel is like a magic trick inside of a magic trick. I can’t figure out how he does what he does. I can only tell you that he arranges words in unlikely combinations that read like nothing you’ve ever read before. I can tell you that his narrator is like the real-life Matt on steroids: hilarious, poignant, heartbreaking, sarcastic, knowing, naive, worldly, goofy, cutting, generous, and sometimes–make that often–all these things at once. I tried leafing through the book after I finished, to find examples of what I’m talking about, and there were literally too many to choose from. Pretty much the whole goddamn book. That’s my pull quote. The whole damn book. Every time I wanted to start underlining, I couldn’t see a place to stop. And looking up above where I’d started, I wanted to underline all that stuff too.
In fact, just opening the book randomly now, I find this passage in which Rich is describing the state of his married sex-life after the birth of his children:
“In a previous life, she bit my neck and licked my ear when we did it. After Kaya, I worried about courting her in my pajamas, with our little angel breathing down the hall, and lost focus and cringed as Robin’s patience ran out if I finished too fast or not fast enough and overstayed my welcome. Bad sex was better than nothing, but Beanie effectively ended the badness. Fuckless weeks, excused by parenting, turned weirdly okay. Like our anniversary, we weren’t sure anymore when it was supposed to happen. And, with the exception of my tongue on her clitoris every who knows when, she didn’t need to be touched. She had vibrators for that. I think she mostly thought of what I did as a way to save batteries.”
But Rich’s comic takedown of married sex is only part of his discontent. He is a man caught up in a maelstrom of conflicting desires, which become for him a kind of Venus fly trap of love, money, and success counterbalanced by what one must sacrifice to acquire them–freedom, loyalty, self-respect, time with one’s children–in short, the modern condition, in which so much is promised and so little is attainable without the sacrifice of one’s humanity.
The main action of the book takes place during a week-long workshop at an annual summer artist’s retreat where Rich has taught for years (though he now fears that even this small fruit of his early success is in jeopardy due to the appearance on the scene of a younger, more successful, less white, version of himself). Adding to his agita is a long-anticipated reunion with Amy, the woman he met at the retreat and began an affair with the previous summer. A year-long torrent of texts and emails has got them both hot and bothered and wondering where things will lead. For Rich, Amy fills the void of love and passion that his marriage no longer seems to provide, and he both desires her and feels repulsed by her, by the need she stirs in him, and by her married-to-a-billionaire other life. Here Rich’s quandary, his ambivalence about Amy and about money, is made manifest: “They lived in a monstrous stone-and-shingle masterpiece and also owned a $20 million duplex overlooking Central Park, and a ‘crappy’ place in London, and a ‘nice’ place in Chamonix. She employed a French-speaking Moroccan chef name Yasmine. I hated her life but thought I should have it.”
The reason I call what Matt has done a magic act is because, while he has a story to tell, the story does not drive the book. Language does, the abundance of acutely observed details, the descriptions of people and places. And, most important, the narrator’s ability (see below) to riff like Coltrane about what he is going through, to describe the texture of his life, to let us in on his struggle:
“We’d put a lot into our emails. It was a gigantic pain in the ass. If either of us slacked off, the other one got offended. You had be timely and consistently thoughtful. Although it was nice knowing that on nights when I couldn’t sleep, at least someone out there was listening. When I started spiraling into my own black hole, or when Beanie went loco at two a.m., or when Kaya cried because her pillow was too hot, or when the magazine sent back my drawing thirty-seven times for revisions and then killed it, or when I received actual death threats for a cartoon I drew mocking military methods of interrogation, or when the dental surgeon sent me a bill for two thousand nine hundred fucking dollars, or the neighbors hated me because my car blew clouds of whitish-blackish smoke, or when Robin said I tasted like something she had for dinner that she didn’t feel like tasting again, when I thought nobody would ever want me again, that I’d never crawl into bed with someone and fall into her arms, grateful, protected, in love–I could say it, through that doohickey in my pocket, and by the power of instantaneous electronic transmission it would find her, rising out of a dead sleep in the middle of the night, and she’d zap back a little something to cheer me up, and that would be enough.”
So like I said, I may hate my old friend a little for being able to write like a virtuoso and slay me with what he knows not just about his life but about my life, everyone’s life, about marriage and money and work and kids and all the important things that we think we know but don’t really understand until someone like Matt points out something about us we felt but hadn’t recognized–e.g. “the increasing awkwardness of disrobing in front of my wife”–and we go, “Holy shit!” So yes, fuck that guy, but also I love him and admire him. I love him for the way he digs down deep into the uncomfortable innards of his ugliest urges, his most primal needs, and finds the truth there and makes the truth funny and hot to the touch and dangerous and necessary. And I love him because he then has the balls to put it out there for any friend or stranger to see. And I love him because even if I were a stranger, I’d want to be his friend.
Rich is a 42 year old man who is unsatisfied with his life, family, and marriage. He used to be a famous cartoonist, but now a”Has-been”. He is broke with no fame. He has a wife who is angry all the time, two kids who he feels drain his creativity, and a mistress who has a husband with two kids. Rich teaches a cartoon class for four days every year in a convention where he see’s his mistress Amy. I really did’t enjoy this book. It annoyed me to no end. No my cup of tea I guess.
Who is Rich? is very well written and Klam’s story-telling is often quite compelling, but the inner dialogue of this character quickly became tedious. Rich is sad and unhappy in his life. He can’t accept that his time in the limelight of being a published graphic novelist may be over, that kids and responsibilities often come before intimacy in marriage, and things aren’t always just handed to you. Instead of doing something about his sad life, he is whiny, self-absorbed, at times petty, indecisive, and when he does manage to make a decision, it’s often the wrong one, which leads to more whining and inner turmoil. He waffles back and forth between his wife and his mistress, and in all honesty, I found them as sad as he is. Several times, I laid this one aside because I just couldn’t take any more of Rich’s angst. I did push through, hoping for a good outcome, but didn’t find any improvement in this man’s life when I turned the last page. For me, it became one long, depressing story. I felt as though I could skip any given part of this book and pick back up with Rich still complaining about everything wrong in his life. As I said in the beginning, Klam’s writing is very good and I would read another book by him, but this one just wasn’t for me.