The best thing about the Privileges, far and away, is the opening scene (which lasts for about the first 20% of the book, so not trivial) Dee opens on the wedding between two relatively normal people with big ambitions and focuses on their interactions with each other, their friends, their parents and their siblings. In this microcosm of their relationship, each character is nuanced and each interaction is deftly painted: the overbearing mother, the chronically late spoiled rich kid, the "alternative" step-sister who is SO over this. It's funny and relatable. (This scene deserves all the stars, so I'm going to keep this a three star review, instead of two, which is what the rest of the book deserves.)

And then...it's like when you meet someone and you have this great conversation with them and you have so much in common and you imagine this entire friendship spreading out before you, but then the next time you get together they spout vaguely offensive views and only want to talk about football and you realize you don't actually have anything in common? The first amazing scene is what makes the rest of the lackluster book hurt so much. Because everything else is lackluster. It's not bad, certainly, but it's just boring. Flat as paper characters wander around their super rich life, with their super perfect marriage to each other. And as much as there's no characterization, there's not really plot either. Yes, things happen, but they aren't related to each other and they result in no change upon the flimsy characters. Dee is trying to make a point about wealth and all of his characters and plot are servants to his point.

This book is basically a fable about wealth, but it's not even clear to me what point about wealth Dee is trying to make. There's the disaffected rich girl and the boy who's rich but want's to be a Trustafarian and then the rich woman who devotes her time to charities, but apparently earnestly so, and the rich man who maybe cheated the system to get rich, but then the book implies later that he continued to get rich even after he stopped insider-trading. And there's a very short bit about the hypocrisy of supporting charities while getting rich off of factories in China, which was interesting, but only lasted about two paragraphs.


Finally, the last 20% made me want to tear my hair out. For no good reason that I can understand, Dee decides to intercut three different threads, for over 50 pages. Intercutting is a literary technique that can drive me crazy at the best of times, but intercutting that many scenes, which were totally unrelated for that long was a special sort of obnoxious. The intercuts came quickly enough that it was hard to get into any scene, and since there were three other stories to cut into, you lost all emotional resonance with the first one by the time you got back to it. (For the record, just to help emphasize the bizarreness, the threads were:

-the son becomes takes an art class, becomes involved with his TA, who is into outsider art; he becomes fascinated by outsider art; he eventually tries to meet an artist; he gets kidnapped; he escapes)
-the daughter goes to a nightclub and gets drunk. She gets picked up by some "EuroTrash" guys. They crash her parents beach house. They party and wreck the house. They drive home and get into a car crash. Her parents punish her by making her dad take her with him on his business trip to China. They go to China. They visit a factory and she thinks it's hypocritical that her dad invests in a factory in China (even though none of the real problems with Chinese labor are actually on view here -- it seems to be a factory staffed exclusively by adults and teenagers, without any apparent bad labor conditions.)
-The mother's father is dying in a hospice. She's called by the father's girlfriend, whom she didn't know existed. She flies to Florida, where he is. She sits at his bedside. She pays the father's girlfriend to go away. The father eventually dies.

Now imagine reading those plots 3 to 4 pages at a time, separated by 10 pages of other stuff. ( )

About this book, Jonathan Dee stated, "I wanted to write a book about a perfect marriage...a marriage so perfect it throws off the couple's perspective on the world outside of it." The novel opens with a long chapter on the wedding of Adam and Cynthia, as their family and friends gather to celebrate. Each succeeding chapter advances their lives a few (or in some cases a lot) of years. For example, in the second chapter Cynthia is a stay-at-home mom with two small children ("she had fallen into the underworld of women with nothing special to do,"), and Adam an up-and-coming analyst at a hedge fund. While their lives are not without problems, they are a "golden" couple, and they become fabulously wealthy, but remain deeply in love and devoted to their family. But as the author notes, they do lack perspective. Adam for example amasses a huge part of his fortune from illegal trading, rationalizing that it hurts no one (this also involves hiding assets overseas). When Cynthia finds out, she's not particularly concerned whether he may get caught; her only question to him was "Were you unfaithful to me?" And over the years we follow their children as well. April becomes a "party girl"/social dilettante, someone her parents frequently have to intervene with to save her from herself. Younger brother Jonas, in contrast, doesn't want anyone to know how wealthy he is, and is a serious art scholar.

I enjoyed this "family saga." It was fun to read a well-written novel about how the other half lives. Jonathan Dee is starting to fall into the category "Authors I Follow."

First Line: "A wedding! The first of a generation; the bride and groom are just 22, young to be married these days."

Last Line: "Let's go out and get new ones. My treat."

3 stars ( )

Todo comienza con una gran boda en Pittsburgh. Se casan Cynthia y Adam; ambos tienen veintidós años y son los primeros de su generación en entrar en la temida, despreciada, ambiguamente deseada vida de los adultos. Viven juntos desde hace dos años en Nueva York, pero se casan en Pittsburgh –una opaca ciudad industrial– porque el segundo marido de la madre de Cynthia, el acaudalado Warren Sikes, ha pagado con mucho gusto la suntuosa boda. Y también el viaje y el alojamiento de los invitados, un batallón de jóvenes que desdeñan el mundo de sus mayores pero no tienen ningún deseo de cambiarlo; sólo quieren apoderarse de él, y saben que inevitablemente les llegará la oportunidad. Esta entrada en la vida adulta es también el comienzo del ascenso de Adam y Cynthia Morey desde la clase media hasta las cimas del gran dinero, donde se viaja en jets privados, se tiene siempre una limusina con un chófer disponible y se acaba creando una fundación u obra de beneficencia para ayudar a los desposeídos, lavar el dinero, admirarse a uno mismo.

I loved this book, and was enthralled with all of the characters, up until the last ten pages. The end confused me more than anything. Maybe I'm not intellectual enough to understand, but I just didn't get it. I felt let down, like the plot had been building and building and then... I don't know. ( )

I don’t need a novel to have likeable characters in order for me to enjoy it. That idea is certainly put to the test by this book although in truth the characters have depth and nuance that blow away the idea of a binary good or bad simplicity. I was totally hooked by the opening chapter which puts you right into a wedding and is wonderfully observed. The emptiness of the filthy rich is certainly a timely topic and by showing instead of preaching this book gets it right. I really like Dee’s omniscient bird person narration and it works very well in this book. The leaps in time throughout the book worked for me also. I’m not sure about the way he ended it but I will think about it some more and I suspicion will come around to it. This is the second of his books I have read and they were both excellent. ( )