Why we love stories about messy rich people

…and hate ourselves for it

Hi all,

First a brief update à propos of my last newsletter: Substack launched Notes last week, and I’ve effectively left Twitter. (NPR and PBS have, too, but for other reasons.)

If you’d like to give Notes a try, head to substack.com/notes or find the “Notes” tab in the Substack app. As a subscriber to quite useless, you’ll automatically see my notes.

You can also share notes of your own. It’s still early days, but I’m hopeful the fundamental difference in Substack’s business model (subscription) vs. the big legacy platforms (advertising) will offer structural incentives better aligned with what most of us really want out of social media: vigorous intellectual debate connection.

And with that, on to a topic of, for better or worse, my deeply genuine interest…

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Stories about messy rich people

Some of the most common exclamations of praise and condemnation alike I see in reader reviews—not just of my novel, but of high society novels in general—fall along the spectrum of:

omg I don’t know why I love novels about messy rich people so much, but I do

and

ugh I hate novels about awful rich people, why did I think this one would be different?

Even at these extremities, such comments are often curiously undercut, the praise intoned as an apology, the complaints laced with concessions—to certain characters, to sentence quality, to being entertained in spite of themselves. Curiously, both sides also tend to couch their reviews as minority opinions. The fans say things like I know this won’t be for everyone, but—, and the detractors: other readers may well like this, but it’s not for me.

Part of what’s going on here is closely related to the prevailing favor of literary moralism, which I wrote about for Lit Hub last year. Part of it lies in aspirational accessibility—in the “Stars: they’re just like US!” phenomenon and its counterpoint (“they’re really not like us, guys; things are hideously inequitable”).

But there’s something else messy rich people narratives structurally feature; something that gets talked about less: many (many) choices.

Yes, wealthy characters have a disproportionate number of options available to them; not just what to buy, but where to go, what to do, who to fuck and who to marry. The sheer range of possibilities render decisions in the face of them (and especially ill-advised ones) supremely interesting. I do not think it a coincidence that atop the “messy rich people” genre lords a novel that expressly engineers a panoply of choices, a veritable choice buffet: The Portrait of a Lady.

Ralph leaned back in his chair with folded arms; his eyes were fixed for some time in meditation. At last, with the air of a man fairly mustering courage, “I take a great interest in my cousin,” he said, “but not the sort of interest you desire. I shall not live many years; but I hope I shall live long enough to see what she does with herself. She’s entirely independent of me; I can exercise very little influence upon her life. But I should like to do something for her.”

“What should you like to do?”

“I should like to put a little wind in her sails.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“I should like to put it into her power to do some of the things she wants. She wants to see the world for instance. I should like to put money in her purse.”

“Ah, I’m glad you’ve thought of that,” said the old man. “But I’ve thought of it too. I’ve left her a legacy—five thousand pounds.”

“That’s capital; it’s very kind of you. But I should like to do a little more.”

Something of that veiled acuteness with which it had been on Daniel Touchett’s part the habit of a lifetime to listen to a financial proposition still lingered in the face in which the invalid had not obliterated the man of business. “I shall be happy to consider it,” he said softly.

“Isabel’s poor then. My mother tells me that she has but a few hundred dollars a year. I should like to make her rich.”

“What do you mean by rich?”

“I call people rich when they’re able to meet the requirements of their imagination. Isabel has a great deal of imagination.”

“So have you, my son,” said Mr. Touchett, listening very attentively but a little confusedly.

“You tell me I shall have money enough for two. What I want is that you should kindly relieve me of my superfluity and make it over to Isabel. Divide my inheritance into two equal halves and give her the second.”

“To do what she likes with?”

“Absolutely what she likes.”

With James in mind, hear me out: the praise and condemnation of novels about messy rich people that so clearly seems a question of character and milieu is actually one of plot. Specifically . . .

The choice plot

In her superb case against the trauma plot, Parul Sehgal directly contrasts it to the marriage plot (“Unlike the marriage plot, the trauma plot does not direct our curiosity toward the future (Will they or won’t they?) but back into the past (What happened to her?)”). I’m suggesting this contrast speaks to a broader and more extensive dichotomy. The choice plot umbrella includes but is not limited to the marriage plot, just as its opposite, which I guess I’ll call the no-choice plot, includes but is not limited to the trauma plot.

In addition to The Portrait of a Lady and the oeuvre of Jane Austen, a few prime examples of the choice plot are The Age of Innocence, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Zuleika Dobson, and more recently Crossroads, Either/Or, and the forthcoming Maddalena and the Dark. While marriage and marriage-adjacent questions frequently feature prominently, what really distinguishes the choice plot is free will. In Zuleika, for instance, she rejects the Duke early; the novel’s climactic choice is whether or not he’ll commit suicide. It is, critically, a choice over which he has agency and control.

In the choice plot, characters make things happen; in the no-choice plot, things happen to characters. Sehgal uses Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life as her trauma-plot prototype, and it’s hard to imagine a more apt example of the no-choice plot more broadly. A good third of the book involves poor Jude getting repeatedly, gratuitously raped—as a child, by multiple different perpetrators, &c. &c. &c.

My objection to this is not moral but aesthetic (only talking about fiction here; of course I morally object to actual rape). Fictional rape is an extreme no-choice plot; it structurally relies on unilateral power dynamics, and unilateral power dynamics are boring. Even in its less violent manifestations, the no-choice plot tends to feature simple powerlessness in its deterministic passivity.

Conversely, the choice plot is distinguished not by absolute power, but by great power operating under frustrating constraints. For all the Duke’s wealth and lineage, he can’t make Zuleika love him. Likewise—and to directly illustrate that choice as opposed to subject matter is the operating concern here, consider a little novel called Lolita. Humbert’s downfall is self-inflicted, his bad decisions the product of freely pursuing the light of his life, fire of his loins. Emphatically not boring!

Note there can be choice plots about the poor and victimized and no-choice plots about the rich and powerful, even though the opposite tends to correlate. Sad-privileged-Brooklyn-lady books like Department of Speculation often hew to the no-choice plot, while twin narratives like Cassandra at the Wedding and The Vanishing Half structurally favor choice regardless of characters’ socioeconomic status.

In spite of Beth Harmon’s many disadvantages as a poor orphan (including a sexual assault in the novel’s opening pages), The Queen’s Gambit is a choice-plot novel par excellence. A girl, and later young woman of great power (in chess) makes things happen in the face of frustrating constraints (basically everything else about her life). And then there is Beloved, a novel that revolves around the most terrifying choice imaginable, the only one Sethe had left. What haunts her most is the thing she herself made happen—how she used her last shred of agency.

Literary factions

Returning to our conflicted lovers and haters of “messy rich people” novels, I think the former are basically proponents of the choice plot, and the latter of the no-choice plot. I’m going to take this a step father and posit that choice vs. no-choice plot lines correlate if not causally link to a host of other literary preferences and tendencies in social novels, in particular those associated with aestheticism vs. moralism.

These connections in light of literary moralism’s current prevalence help to explain why choice-novel lovers often judge themselves for their rich tastes. If it wasn’t abundantly clear already, I think they needn’t. I am not exactly an objective bystander here. Part of what led me down this line of inquiry to begin with was the desire, as I start getting serious about my second novel, to more thoroughly understand my own predilections. I felt the sense not of an incorrectness, exactly, but an incompleteness in my own usual answer: sentence-level aesthetics. A Little Life is at least good if not excellent on the sentence level. It is also probably my least-favorite novel ever.

A choice-plot novel still has to have beautiful sentences for me to want to read it. But I think the no-choice plot basically sucks on such a foundational, structural level that even great prose can’t save it. Literary moralism is pernicious not just for its misplaced goal and dubious revelation then, but because it systematically promotes a plot structure with boring power dynamics, passive behavioral governance, and—I’m gonna say it—cheap emotional tactics.

Prestige TV

It’s worth noting briefly that quintessential choice plots featuring the messiest of rich people are positively thriving in Hollywood. I’m not sure if this is because novels suffer unfairly from their reputation as a “serious” medium while TV is allowed to be enjoyed for the hedonistic entertainment it is, but New York Magazine publishes like thirty fawning articles after every episode of Succession and people eat them up. The White Lotus is filming Season 3, and when it airs I’ll expect the same treatment.

In fairness, Sehgal cites the tremendously popular Ted Lasso as a big victory for the other side. I won’t be able to speak to that though, because obviously—

Ta ta,

Natasha