Ryan Alexander Chapman

 Ryan Alexander Chapman

Ryan Alexander Chapman

A Review of Ryan Alexander Chapman's The Audacity

                                               

Guy Sarvananthan has grown used to the material benefits of life in the literal stratosphere—his penthouse apartment atop one of Manhattan's tallest buildings has a special feature that creates a cloud to block the view. He cannot fathom living otherwise. His wife, Victoria, is a supposedly visionary tech executive whose company claims that it has discovered a cure for cancer. But one night after attending an Oxfam benefit, thereby fulfilling what has become his chief marital duty and, really, sole existential purpose—representing his spouse at cocktail parties and museum galas—Guy is told that Victoria has gone missing, her kayak found afloat in San Francisco Bay.

A loyal underling reveals to Guy that Victoria's entire cancer-curing enterprise is a gigantic fraud. Terrified, fully expecting to be "pilloried in the commons" or even hauled off to jail, Guy panics. Instead of flying to California to join the search for Victoria's body, he redirects the corporate jet to a top-secret, private-island gathering where the richest people in America will try to figure out which cause to benefit with the substantial sums they have agreed to donate to charity. His goal, he tells a fellow attendee, isn't to "solve global problems," as the organizer grandiosely hopes. It's "ruinous intake"—self-obliteration, billionaire-style. 

This self-consciously ridiculous plot ends up being only a pretext for Kingston novelist Ryan Chapman to engage in merciless satire of the super-rich, especially disruption-obsessed tech moguls. Yet for much of

The Audacity, his second novel, Chapman's evident talent for jaunty wordplay seems ill-spent on a story that, like Victoria's once-promising company (inspired by Elizabeth Holmes's Theranos), never manages to get off the ground. These are shallow, soulless people, and it's difficult to care what happens to them. In any event, nothing much does.

The Audacity has a lot in common with HBO's "Succession"—the rapid-fire chatter, knowing allusions, nihilistic detachment—but without the high stakes. The only potential for dramatic tension is whether Victoria killed herself or faked her disappearance to avoid the coming exposure. Yet Chapman dispels the mystery instantly, interspersing longer chapters about Guy at the island forum with brief excerpts from the diary Victoria keeps while hiding out in Joshua Tree, arranging daily cunnilingus sessions with a local hireling and embarking on increasingly punishing runs in the desert, all while trying to force "eureka"—a breakthrough that will get her (and her company, and maybe Guy) out of the jam. We are given from the first to suspect that such an epiphany will elude her. 

Guy doesn't change much either. A former student of musical composition who graduated at the bottom of his conservatory class, Guy recalls his early discovery that "he'd peaked young and at modest elevation." He sleepwalked through the decades as the twice-a-month lover of a married former fellow music student, without ambition or even will, then wedded the high-octane Victoria, agreeing to become her "placid helpmeet," a silent, submissive stand-in on the gala circuit, after a "courtship [that] felt more like recruitment." The Sri Lankan-born Guy is too pathetic not to be flattered. "[H]e could love someone who didn't love him in the same fashion," Chapman writes. "America had prepared him well for that."

It's one of the best lines in the book, yet, as with other nods toward matters of greater profundity (such as climate change), the novel never quite gets around to giving us anything more than a gesture. After two hundred pages of ruinous intake, Guy gets the dramatic finale he went looking for. "Let everyone else have their deathbed grasps at moral clarity, those too-late attempts to make amends," Chapman writes. "Not him. There must be a little honor in staying true to one's fixed self, as dishonorable as that self might be."

The only surprising thing about what happens to our protagonist is the sheer zaniness of the details. Let's just say it involves, among much else, him taking a shit off a roof, then fondly reminiscing about teenage handjobs from a chubby punk cowgirl, before finally getting chased up a tree by a feral pack of shipwrecked boars. It's all pretty absurd, and not exactly in the Camusian sense.