Entitlement

Set in New York City during the summer of 2014, the novel follows Brooke Orr, a 33-year-old Black woman navigating a new job, family tensions, and a consuming desire for financial security that draws her into an increasingly fraught relationship with her billionaire employer.

Brooke has recently left a nine-year stint teaching art at the Endeavor Charter School in the Bronx to become a program coordinator at the Asher and Carol Jaffee Foundation, a small philanthropic organization tasked with giving away the fortune of Asher Jaffee, an 83-year-old billionaire. The foundation operates out of a shabby Midtown office with a tiny staff, including Eileen, the executive director; Jody, a consultant; Kate, the most junior employee; and Natalie, Asher's fiercely loyal assistant of 50 years. The first meeting Brooke attends establishes the foundation's lack of clear direction and Asher's resistance to a formal mission statement, despite his pledge to give away his fortune, which he puts at four billion dollars.

Brooke's personal world is anchored by her mother, Maggie, a lawyer-turned-reproductive-justice advocate, and by Kim, the daughter of Maggie's close friend Sayo. Kim is Brooke's lifelong near-sibling, raised alongside her from childhood. Brooke also has an adopted brother, Alex, a white architect engaged to Rachel, a Persian Jewish woman who works at the United Nations. Early in the novel, Brooke overhears Maggie dismissing her foundation job as "beneath her," calling Brooke "a secretary to some zillionaire" (16). The remark compounds Brooke's sense that her mother views Alex as the successful child.

Eileen and Jody assign Brooke to evaluate a proposal to restore oysters to New York Harbor, but her trajectory shifts when Asher invites her to a private lunch. Over grilled cheese at a chrome diner, he interrogates her about her years at Endeavor, where she introduced students to the work of artists like Carrie Mae Weems and Jean-Michel Basquiat before the school eliminated her arts program in favor of STEM. When Brooke speaks passionately about art belonging to everyone, Asher is moved. He issues a direct challenge: Find organizations teaching children that art is theirs, and bring him a plan.

After the lunch, Brooke receives an unsolicited $250 check from Asher as reimbursement, which she tries to return. Asher refuses, invoking the memory of his daughter Linda, who died at the financial services firm Cantor Fitzgerald on September 11, 2001, and who always negotiated her salary because she understood her own value. He tells Brooke that if she does not ask for what she is owed, she has only herself to blame. This philosophy reshapes Brooke's worldview. She deposits the check.

Brooke's role at the foundation shifts rapidly. Asher names her his protégé, takes her to meetings with the Ford Foundation, and elevates her above the rest of the staff. Through her Auntie Allison, a pragmatic activist with a wide network, Brooke begins touring arts organizations across the city. She realizes Asher will want the story of Black children with Black problems, and her search leads her to the Throop Community School in Brooklyn, which operates out of a church basement. The school is run by Sister Ghalyela Jefferson, who has taught African dance and drumming for 23 years on a sliding scale. Ghalyela is deeply resistant to outside help, viewing offers of money as threats to her autonomy. Over multiple visits, Brooke and Jody reframe the conversation, asking Ghalyela not what she needs but what she hopes for. Ghalyela reveals her deepest wish: a permanent home for the school. A tentative partnership begins, with Ghalyela's daughter Michaela serving as the school's point person.

Kim's purchase of a two-million-dollar apartment, paid for in cash from her late father's inheritance, crystallizes Brooke's growing fixation on property. Their friend Matthew voices the frustration Brooke feels: The people most obsessed with money are not the rich or the poor but those in the middle, who understand what money can do but cannot attain it. Brooke admits for the first time that she wants to buy an apartment.

The relationship between Brooke and Asher deepens. He takes her to Christie's, the auction house, to view a Helen Frankenthaler painting he is considering as a birthday gift for Carol. When he confesses he does not understand abstract art, Brooke explains it with passion, and Asher purchases the painting for $850,000. The experience leaves Brooke exhilarated by the revelation that transcendence itself can be bought and sold. Their evenings grow more intimate: At a dinner at the restaurant Jean-Georges, he urges her to marry; at his penthouse overlooking Central Park, he places his hands on her head, feeling her hair, and tells her he is happy. After a Lincoln Center concert, he tells Brooke he wants her to be his heir and continue his philanthropic work. Brooke is quiet, privately rejecting the sanctified responsibility in favor of something smaller and more selfish.

Brooke contacts Kim's real estate broker and makes an offer on an apartment she cannot afford, rationalizing the gap between desire and means as temporary. When she announces her intention at a family dinner, Maggie cautions prudence. Brooke counters by demanding financial support equal to what Maggie is providing for Alex's wedding, and the conversation ends unresolved.

As her ambitions grow, Brooke's behavior escalates. She types a fraudulent salary verification letter on foundation letterhead, inflating her income and forging Eileen's signature. She uses the foundation's corporate credit card at Saks Fifth Avenue for personal purchases. She persuades the doorman at Asher's apartment building to let her inside by fabricating a story, then takes Matthew on an uninvited tour, delivering an impassioned speech about wealth inequality before the Monet above Asher's sofa. Her relationships fracture: She mocks Kim's ambition to become an interior decorator, skips the memorial service for Auntie Paige, one of Maggie's close circle of women friends who was recently killed by an SUV, and retaliates against her mother's disappointment by revealing Rachel's pregnancy at the dinner table.

At the foundation, Eileen reveals that Asher has moved one billion dollars out of the foundation for Carol's estate planning. When Brooke raises the Throop School proposal, Asher dismisses it, recalling her original mention of $10,000 for an arts program at Endeavor and declaring that same amount for Ghalyela, calling it justice. Brooke is devastated by the gap between the already-approved million-dollar oyster grant and the pittance offered for the souls of Black children.

The novel's climax arrives at Carol's birthday party at the Jaffees' sprawling Greenwich estate. Brooke tours the 19,000-square-foot home, seeing masterpieces by Francis Bacon and David Hockney. She encounters Asher's driver and his family gathered in a back room; the driver's eldest daughter, Amina, sharply corrects Brooke, revealing that her father's name is Christophe, not Christopher, and that he is the son of a Cameroonian Supreme Court judge. When Carol brusquely orders Brooke to direct guests to a back bar, Brooke picks up a silver tray and begins working as a server. She slips upstairs during the party, draws herself a bath in the bathroom adjoining Carol's office, and is discovered by Natalie, who summons Asher.

Asher finds Brooke emerging from the steaming bathroom. Natalie presents her evidence: the forged salary letter, the Saks purchases, the excessive car service vouchers. After Natalie leaves, Brooke abandons her rehearsed pitch and demands that Asher buy her the apartment, arguing that the rules governing ordinary people have never applied to him. When he resists, she escalates, offering to bear him a child and name the baby Linda. Asher is repulsed and orders her to leave.

Brooke descends the stairs, pauses before a Diebenkorn painting in the foyer, then walks out the front door into the cool night. She removes her shoes and leaves them on the gravel. Barefoot, she follows the yellow lines of the road into the darkness, alone, with no sense of direction but a feeling that she is free.