Reading Ryan Chapman’s fiction involves immersion in very specific milieus — including, for his most recent novel The Audacity, an exclusive gathering of the world’s wealthiest people, a kind of 1% of the 1%. Just before he jets off to one such gathering, protagonist Guy Sarvananthan learns that his wife’s highly-touted startup was not exactly honest with investors about the viability of its business, and that she’s now missing and presumed deceased. What emerges is a heady book of big ideas laced with a comedy of manners that moves with an enticing momentum. I spoke with Chapman about writing The Audacity and the challenges it posed.
Your first novel is largely set in a prison; your new novel is largely set on an island retreat for the world’s richest people. Were you intentionally looking to move into very different territory for this one, or did it come about more naturally?
Intuition played a role, but I knew I wanted something radically different. I was also motivated by a book editor telling me how inauspicious the setting would be. And he’s not wrong: Why would anyone care about a Davos-like gathering of the 0.0001%? Well, I decided, I’ll make you care.
They’re obviously very different, but both books deal with societies that are isolated from the larger world with people in close proximity. What draws you to those as settings for your fiction?
I enjoy a hothouse environment, with a bit of ongoing chaos. Feels very circa now, right? It’s also part of a larger challenge. How do I realistically and perhaps sympathetically render these spaces that are otherwise shut out of the contemporary novel? Plenty of writers tackle New York, academia, the domestic space, etc. I’m interested in a hidden microcosm, full of its own abrasions and wonders.
Are there any works of fiction or nonfiction about communities that you see as literary ancestors of your work? (This question brought to you by the fact that I just finished J.G. Ballard’s Super-Cannes.)
I reread Michael Chabon’s Wonder Boys, to see how he negotiated the timeframe of a long weekend (and with a protagonist in addled free-fall), and I suppose Donald Antrim’s masterpiece The Hundred Brothers is never far from mind. I’d also mention Matthew Klam’s underrated Who Is Rich? and Lydia Millet’s A Children’s Bible.
The Big Ideas of the very wealthy can sometimes read like the stuff of absurdist fiction even in real life. To what extent were you riffing on actual ideas in The Audacity versus inventing things whole cloth?
Sadly, the more absurd elements derived from research. Look up Peter Thiel’s seasteading proposals. (Or better yet, don’t.) There’s plenty of invention, too, and certain elements–like surgically enhancing sex workers to resemble the Mona Lisa–which I hope remain the stuff of fantasy.
Was there anything that you’d written about with the intention of it being satire that became an actual thing between writing and publication?
Real life often outstrips the satirist’s imagination. I knew philanthropists operated from a baseline hypocrisy, for instance, but even I was surprised when Warren Buffett recently reneged on his multibillion-dollar pledge to the Gates Foundation; the money’s going to his retirement-age progeny instead.
As for the book, there was an offhand reference to a billionaire’s fatal accident that had to be changed a few times. I eventually settled on a deep-sea submersible implosion–then the Titan accident occurred. We were close to finalizing the manuscript, so my editor let me off the hook. There were also details from the book that would pop up in Succession; I’d swear aloud, then go back to revising some more.
This is potentially a strange question, but: it’s hard not to see a book with “The Audacity” in the title and not think of a certain former president’s memoir. Was that something that you had to reckon with as you readied this novel?
On the one hand, I gambled that a book that sold millions of copies wouldn’t come to mind with today’s readers. (I’m a poor gambler.) On the other hand, my novel’s concerned with the multiple connotations of the word “audacity,” and America’s assimilationist, rags-to-riches narratives. Or in my case, rags-to-riches-to-rags.
There’s a parallel structure afoot in The Audacity, and I’m curious: was that there from the outset or did it evolve as you worked on the book?
Victoria’s chapters were always there, but they took the longest to develop. I knew I wanted a close-third voice for Guy, and his bull-in-a-China-shop behavior was great fun to write. Victoria stymied me for a couple years. How to render the introspective narrative of someone nearly incapable of it, and possibly resistant to change of any kind? It clicked into place when I realized her sections would be discrete diary entries, written on index cards, tossed into the fire each night. She could be honest, or her version of honest.
Was there anything that surprised you about the evolution of this novel as you wrote it?
I started the book before the pandemic, but only upon finishing did I realize how much of it was informed by this notion of widespread catastrophe. Not everyone’s going to react nobly–in fact, the ignoble response might be the more common. And more interesting to write about. We stare into the abyss, we laugh at the abyss, the abyss laughs back.
Photo: Beowulf Sheehan
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