BONUS: This edition contains a The Privileges discussion guide.
Smart and socially gifted, Adam and Cynthia Morey are perfect for each other.
With Adamβs rising career in the world of private equity, a beautiful home in
Manhattan, gorgeous children, and plenty of money, they are, by any reasonable
standard, successful. But for the Moreys, their future of boundless privilege is not
arriving fast enough. As Cynthia begins to drift, Adam is confronted with a choice
that will test how much he is willing to risk to ensure his familyβs happiness and
to recapture the sense that the only acceptable life is one of infinite possibility.
The Privileges is an odyssey of a couple touched by fortune, changed by time, and
guided above all else by their epic love for each other.
From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Dee's four prior novels (Palladio; etc.) cast an intelligent, calculating eye on the culturally topical, which sparked comparisons to the writings of Updike, DeLillo and Franzen. The wedding of Adam and Cynthia Morey, a young and charming couple who quickly expand into a brood of four, begins Dee's fifth. Adam and Cynthia's nuanced personalities and playful, sincere exchanges form the novel's empathic backbone as Adam begins to profit immensely from risky side ventures while working for a hedge fund. Dee establishes a trust with his readers that allows Adam's murky business ethics to escape the spotlight of outright moral scrutiny, and by showing how Adam endangers his privilegeβwhile his children endanger their own livesβDee reveals how risk is a kind of numbing balm. April, Adam's daughter, responds to the boredom of material comfort by resorting to drug-induced self-effacement. The novel climaxes as the children face the possibility of their own death, though lucidity after mortal danger is fleeting: I can feel myself forgetting what it feels like to feel, April says. Dee notably spurns flat portraits of greed, instead letting the characters' self-awareness and self-forgetfulness stand on their own to create an appealing portrait of a world won by risk. (Jan.)
Copyright Β© Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
In his previous four novels, Dee has dramatized peculiarly American forms of absurdity and moral bankruptcy with search-and-destroy precision and calculated understatement. That approach serves him well in this ensnaring tale of alienating wealth, in which Dee breaks fresh artistic ground with the sheer beauty and quiet poignancy of his prose. Picture-perfect and ferociously confident and ambitious Adam and Cynthia marry right out of college and quickly have children, April and Jonas. Adam excels at a private equity firm in Manhattan, but, impatient for the big money, he also launches a high-stakes insider-trading venture. The gleaming Moreys become so impossibly rich they donβt seem quite human to others, and, of course, money doesnβt preclude suffering. Dee deftly avoids clichΓ© as Adam and Cynthia go against type by being fiercely loyal to each other, April takes desperate risks, and Jonas, the brightest and most creative of the clan, embarks on an inquiry into outsider art that lands him in a strange and terrifying predicament. A suspenseful, melancholy, and acidly funny tale about self, family, entitlement, and lifeβs mysteries and inevitabilities. --Donna Seaman
Library : General
Formats : EPUB
ISBN : 1849015937