About this item
A provocative and hilarious satire of love, sex, money, and politics in our new gilded age - the long-awaited first novel from the the acclaimed author of Sam the CatEvery summer, a once-sort-of-famous forty-two-year-old cartoonist named Rich Fischer leaves his wife and two kids behind to teach a cartooning class at a week long summer arts conference in a charming New England beachside town. It's a place where every year students - nature poets and driftwood sculptors, widowed seniors, teenagers away from home for the first time - show up to study with an esteemed faculty made up of Nobel Prize-winning playwrights, actors, and historians; drunkards and perverts; members of the cultural elite; unknown nobodies, midlist somebodies, and legitimate stars, a place where drum circles happen on the beach at midnight, clothing optional. One of the attendees is a forty-one-year-old painting student named Amy O'Donnell. Amy is a mother of three, unhappily married to a brutish Wall Street titan who runs a multibillion-dollar investment fund and commutes to work via helicopter. Rich and Amy met at the conference a year ago, shared a moment of passion, then spent the winter exchanging inappropriate texts and emails and counting the days until they could see each other again. Now they're back. Once more, Rich finds himself in this seaside paradise, worrying about his family's nights without him, and trying not to think about his book, now out of print, or his mercenary existence as an illustrator at a glossy magazine about to go under, or his back taxes, or the shameless shenanigans of his colleagues at this summer make-out festival, or his own very real desire for love and human contact. He can't decide whether Amy is going to rescue or destroy him. Who Is Rich? is a warped and exhilarating tale of love and adultery, a study in midlife alienation, erotic pleasure, envy, and bitterness in the new gilded age that goes far beyond the humor and satire to address deeper questions: of family, monogamy, the intoxicating beauty of children, and the challenging interdependence of two soulful, sensitive creatures in a confusing domestic alliance.Advance praise for Who Is Rich?"It's amazing to wait so long for a book, and for it to be everything you wanted. The most singular quality of Matthew Klam's writing is how alive it is. I loved every page of this book. It got into my bloodstream - and kind of destroyed me." - Curtis Sittenfeld"By turns fierce, disturbing, and outright hilarious, Who Is Rich? is much more than a novel of midlife crisis; it's a frank exploration of what it feels like to struggle as an artist and a man. Klam writes like a surgeon, with the sharpest of scalpels, and cuts to the bone." - Jonathan Tropper"I've been eagerly awaiting another book by Matthew Klam - and here it is, and it's a stunner. This, his first novel, is funny, dark, big, and bold. I read it straight through, with great pleasure and awe at all he knows about art, money, family, sex, kids, mortality, and shame. Not to be missed." - Meg Wolitzer
About the Author
Matthew Klam was named one of the twenty best fiction writers in America under 40 by The New Yorker. He's a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Robert Bingham/PEN Award, a Whiting Writer's Award, and an O Henry Award. His first book, Sam The Cat and Other Stories, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book of the Year in the category of first fiction, was selected as a Notable Book of the Year by The New York Times, Esquire Magazine, The Los Angeles Times, The Kansas City Star, and by the Borders for their New Voices series. His work has been featured in The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, Esquire, GQ Magazine, and The New York Times Magazine. He is a graduate of the University of New Hampshire and Hollins College, and has taught creative writing in many places including Johns Hopkins University, St. Albans School, American University, and Stockholm University in Sweden.
