ramblingmads

To protect their lavish allowances, four charismatic sisters in their thirties try to seduce, cajole, and mislead their less well-off neighbor Benjamin, who their father has hired to investigate an attempt to smother him while he was in the hospital recovering from a car crash. Their feckless brother responds by threatening Benjamin with a shotgun, while their socialite mother falsely confesses to the crime.

Trying to dominate everyone is their father, a wheeling, dealing, helicopter-flying entrepreneur who is afraid he might have hallucinated the smothering, even more afraid that it might have been real, and terrified that he might be losing control of his family and fortune. Desperate, he implements a devious and dastardly scheme . . .

Played out on the fashionable Connecticut shore and Manhattan’s Upper East Side, the shenanigans of the entitled rich don’t prevent Benjamin from finding the truth, and maybe even love.

“A knotted and frequently engaging tale of deception and family secrets.” –  Kirkus Reviews

“In his literary debut, Leonard Orr demonstrates that he is a superb writer of spare, precise, and compelling prose. At the core of Entitled is hyperwealth and how it embroils a family. Like the The Great Gatsby, Orr’s gripping novel brings romance, selfishness, familial enmity, irony (even a touch of humor), and terrible tragedy to these lives of privilege. I highly recommend it.”  – Peter Carry, writer, editor

“The twisted plot of this surprising whodunnit is a hunt for who didn’t do it-who it was that tried but failed to kill the rich and ruthless old patriarch. From the start, however, those suspects include even the old man’s loved ones. Set among the strivers and connivers of New York’s upper 1%, Orr’s engaging tale is a feast of family dysfunction, privilege, and secrets.” – William C. Rempel, bestselling author of The Gambler and At the Devil’s Table

“This is an intelligent, strong, intricate narrative, carried along by characters who are well drawn and complete, at least for the purposes they play in this narrative. While Benjamin claims much of the spotlight, Charlie Cantling’s presence is remarkable in its various roles – catalyst, antagonist, egomaniacal patriarch, with personal traits that all point to meanness and manipulation. Beyond that, four distinctive sisters, a woebegone brother, and Benjamin’s own brother come across as the various components of a complex mélange, each with his or her own psychological damage stemming from Charlie’s machinations. There’s a sophistication to all this that is quite refreshing, and very well done.” – Greg Fields, author of The Bright Freight of Memory

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Leonard H. Orr has written for The Village Voice, The New York Times, and other publications. A graduate of Swarthmore College, he has also been an editor and investment manager, where he’s been a witness to the ambition and entitlement and sorrow his novel portrays.

Website

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Prologue

He lies in a hospital bed, bandaged to the nines and attached to the latest instruments of artificial life. Images flicker before him, and fluttery lines on a video screen vouch for brain activity, but few would call it thinking. In his fractured world he doesn’t hear the beep of machines nor feel the stab of needles. He doesn’t remember instructing his driver to stay ahead of the Friday night traffic before it peaked. He doesn’t recall the rise in the road that hid the jam ahead, doesn’t recall the curse of his driver when the car reached the top of the hill, the scream of the brakes, the veering off, the tumbling. 

The police have measured tire marks, a coroner examined the driver’s body, and chemists have parsed the dead man’s blood. They found a routine case of too much velocity and not enough time and redirected to more opaque disasters. 

Visitors to the hospital are where the murk sets in. Men Charlie Cantling hired for the corporation—and a few women—arrive, look grim, and muse aloud about his chances and, in silence, about their jobs. They’d love to redo the pyramid of who reports to whom, each with a different design, but ancient arrangements leave them neutered and send them to lunch with headhunters. Real power resides with Cantling’s children, who arrive bringing a minimum of tears and some aptitude for scheming. With Charlie likely dying, they’ll need cold blood for decisions to come, and over the years, with their father’s help, they’d acquired it. Some have seen the family lawyer, who advises inaction and waiting for further advice. Some, whom Cantling would call them ungrateful, have lawyers of their own.

When he’s little changed day to day, the flow of visitors thins, for this protracted dying is somewhere between nuisance and tragedy, and doctors still can’t restore the dead. Then the surprises begin. His bones begin to mend, his limbs and organs start to function, he has moments of near-lucidity. The doctors admit he has chances, but early progress is crucia, and his may have been too slow. He’s in his late sixties and his health was good, but setbacks or stagnation are still major risks. The most reasonable hope is he’ll stabilize, neither paralyzed nor mobile, not numb and not alert, sometimes sensible, often not, born to command and commanding nothing.

In his lucid moments the doctors warn him: because of drugs and trauma, you can’t trust what you think you know, can’t tell the real from the imagined. About his brain’s wilder renderings—wingless flying, jumps in time, cameos of the dead—he agrees. One scene from the present is too coherent to shrug off and so vivid that in druggy variation it repeats again and again. He’s on his back in his hospital bed and half-awake. Suddenly, there’s a pillow on his face, a strangely heavy heap of fluff pressing on nose and mouth. He fights. The weight feels huge, relentless. He struggles to breathe but sucks in fabric and stuffing. He’s suffocating. His hands rip at forearms above him. I won’t let these bastards win, he thinks. Never. He writhes and swings his head, finds a pocket of air—and breathes and steels himself for further struggle.

The weight lifts. “Tough old guy,” whispers a voice he can’t identify. “The man’s mind doesn’t work but his body keeps fighting. We’ll have to find another way.” “It would be the right thing,” someone whispers, “for him”. “Yeah,” the first voice whispers, “for him and everybody else.

As his strength returns and his drug-induced delirium subsides, he notifies the authorities and calls for guards and cameras. He exults and he rages. Phantoms or not, the whisperers have lost. Their chances have died, and he hasn’t.

It takes him weeks to fully recognize his mistake.

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My thoughts: This is a blackly comic novel about an obscenely wealthy family fighting over control of the family company and therefore the money, even though the patriarch isn’t actually dead. Yet.

Their unfortunate neighbour, Benjamin, gets dragged into the family drama, partly because helicopter wielding Charlie wants to buy his house, but also because he suspects one of his family tried to finish him off while he was lying in his hospital bed and he wants Benjamin to find out who it was.

But the Cantlings are all liars and deeply divided, they try to either get Benjamin on their side or threaten him, or both. He can’t get out of it, his boss is very keen to keep Charlie as a client, his brother keeps getting in the way (he may or may not have slept with multiple Cantling sisters), he’s tired of being threatened at gun point, and running out of ways to get the Cantlings to answer his questions.

I really enjoyed the absolutely over the top nonsense this privileged family got up to, talk about sibling rivalry. And the honey farm was hilarious. Benjamin was empathetic and stuck in the worst situation of his life. Nothing he did made anything better for himself, and he just couldn’t get out of it, even after ending up in the hospital. Very entertaining.

*I was kindly gifted a copy of this book in exchange for taking part in this blog tour, but all opinions remain my own.