You’d prefer to be enlightened. You click on the embedded hyperlink, and a touchdown web page hundreds. Welcome, it says, to NuLife. Welcome to the Goop-meets-Theranos-meets-Heavens-Gate sham wellness empire on the coronary heart of “Confidence,” the brand new novel from Rafael Frumkin.
Like most nice capers, “Confidence” begins with a scrappy underdog down on his luck. Frumkin’s narrator, the spiky however susceptible Ezra Inexperienced, was born poor; he has horrible eyesight and finds himself at reform camp after one among his schemes for fast cash significantly injures a classmate. It’s there that he meets fellow grifter Orson Ortman, the good-looking and magnetic Jay Gatsby to his Nick Carraway, wealthy with contraband weed and simple allure. For Ezra, it’s soul-deep devotion at first sight. We’re unsure what it’s for Orson, even after they begin sleeping collectively.
The 2 run more and more high-stakes cons to assist themselves, till Orson invents one thing referred to as “synthesis,” a scientifically doubtful type of pretend hypnosis they will promote to wealthy folks determined for achievement. The Synthesis con turns into a company — and a cultish non secular collective — referred to as NuLife. At NuLife’s peak, Orson reigns over a commune of devoted disciples whereas Ezra does the soiled work of steering their billion-dollar firm. All this, within the title of taking what they’re owed from the one p.c.
Ezra’s acerbic narration skewers celebrity-led wellness influencing, empty-eyed enterprise tycoons and Silicon Valley scammers with the cruel verve of an episode of “Succession.” Highlights of Frumkin’s darkish and reducing humor embody an Elon Musk-esque billionaire inventor who magnanimously palms out drones to kids begging for cash and a tabloid referring to Orson as “L. Ron Hotboy.”
But it surely’s below this salty, toothsome crust that Frumkin does his most intricate and compelling work: the deconstruction of Ezra’s personal morality.
On the novel’s outset, Ezra scrabbles by his world with sincere starvation and comprehensible, if generally pedantic, disdain for these with greater than him.
He’s a millennial Robin Hood, pausing sometimes to marvel if he’s gone too far. On this financial system, we wish to root for the man taking wealthy idiots for a trip. Ezra is us in our late-on-rent fantasies. He steals what he wants — deserves — from a category of people that gained’t even miss it, and if he momentarily forgets their humanity, it should have been an accident.
However because the human prices of his schemes add up, we start to see what Ezra can’t (actually, as his imaginative and prescient deteriorates). We expect we all know an underdog story once we see one, and by definition, we maintain the underdog as morally good. “Confidence” challenges us to ask: What if our protagonist isn’t an excellent particular person? What if we all know this, however Ezra doesn’t? And what occurs when an unreliable ethical compass enters the magnetic discipline of a narcissist like Orson?
Orson is a genius, a visionary, a magician, a god with a golden contact. Even when he had by no means ascended from con man to cult chief, he would nonetheless be all of these items to Ezra, as a withholding narcissist assumes superhuman hugeness within the eyes of the one that loves them.
In Ezra’s narrowing imaginative and prescient, there’s room for nothing however Orson and his diminishing emotional returns. No room to note that he solely ever praises Ezra for his utility of their cons, or that Ezra’s assignments for NuLife maintain him removed from Orson and near incrimination, or that his dream of lastly getting Orson’s consideration lengthy sufficient to marry him was by no means going to occur.
When Ezra wonders ultimately if he may have presumably been Orson’s first mark, it’s a poetic stab to the center. How pitiful, how tragic, how morbidly romantic, that Ezra needs to be Orson’s best con, and the final to know.
“Confidence” asks the reader to weigh ardour towards greed, genius towards narcissism, love towards habit. Sure, Frumkin accomplishes this by holding an unflattering mirror to bloviating billionaires, rip-off start-ups, and the wellness industrial advanced, however he additionally does it by digging into our confidence in our personal morality. How simple wouldn’t it be to lose, below the fitting circumstances? Would we discover if we did? Or would we wind up like Ezra: too satisfied he’s nonetheless the great man, doing unhealthy issues for good causes, to see the reality?
As a criminal offense novel, “Confidence” is a propulsive, cheeky, eat-the-rich page-turner to fulfill the longing for a well-crafted caper. As a felony, Ezra Inexperienced learns the exhausting approach that, as soon as the workers has cleared the gilded china, you’re what you eat.
Casey McQuiston is writer of the novels “Crimson, White & Royal Blue,” “One Final Cease” and “I Kissed Shara Wheeler.”
Simon & Schuster. 320 pp. $27.99
A notice to our readers
We’re a participant within the Amazon Providers LLC Associates Program,
an affiliate promoting program designed to supply a method for us to earn charges by linking
to Amazon.com and affiliated websites.