Fiction Review: The Audacity

Every spring, my mom and I travel to Vermont to attend Booktopia, a wonderful bookish weekend hosted by the Northshire Bookstore in Manchester that combines about 8-9 authors and 100 or so readers for book discussions, meals, games, and a lot of fun! (tickets still available; my recap/vlog from Booktopia 2023) We'll be attending Booktopia next weekend! So, every year at this time, I try to read as many books as I can that will be featured at the event. One of those is The Audacity, a unique satirical novel that I enjoyed.

Guy Sarvananthan was born in Sri Lanka and immigrated with his parents to the U.S. as a child. He went to a music conservatory for college, where he became a decent, middling composer. Victoria Stevens, a hard-driving, highly motivated woman plucked Guy out of obscurity by marrying him. She started PrevYou, a Theranos-type company that created self-serve health booths, located in cities everywhere, to collect data with the simple aim of nothing less than curing cancer. Guy now runs the philanthropic arm of her multi-billion-dollar company. He comes home from yet another charity gala one night to discover that Victoria is missing and possibly presumed dead, until he finds out from her board that the news is about to break that the company has failed at its mission and the whole thing (and Victoria) is a fraud. Knowing his wife, Guy quickly realizes she disappeared intentionally to ride out the media storm, but he's hurt and stunned that she didn't include him in her plan. Devastated and betrayed and realizing his life of luxury is about to end, Guy accepts an invitation (that was actually for Victoria) to a private island. It's an event, called The Summit, hosted by a billionaire for the world's wealthiest people (not the top 1% but the top 0.001%) to solve the world's problems! Guy has no interest in the weekend's grand aims; his goal is to try to forget what is happening (and about to happen) to him and go out with a bang.

The satire here is thick, right from the opening scene at that charity gala in New York, where the attendees are all bored with the extravagance that surrounds them  (some of those same people are invited to the island). If you saw Murder at the End of the World on Hulu, this gathering is a lot like that one, only even more decadent. I generally prefer my satire in smaller doses, like short stories or essays, but this novel grew on me. It has a lot of humor, especially in the second half. While the focus is on Guy, the betrayed spouse, Victoria gets her own chapters where her driven, productivity-obsessed approach to rebranding herself is also skewered. This novel is not for the faint of heart, and I know that at least one of my Booktopia buddies really hated it. There is a lot of hard drinking, drugs, and sex in the novel--that's pretty much Guy's goal, to just obliterate reality and block out what's happening to him. So, if that sort of thing offends you, this is probably not the book for you. But it is a very smart, clever satire, and I enjoyed it. I'm looking forward to meeting the author next week!

288 pages, Soho Press

HighBridge audio (a division of Recorded Books)

This book fits in the following 2024 Reading Challenges:

 

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