As a species, we are tortured by the notion of non-belonging: from an evolutionary standpoint, if we don’t fit in, we may just die. Many novels concentrated on the person who feels inferior and out of place—even if they aren’t novels we’d categorize as thriller or horror—result in someone’s murder. The stakes of being excluded are just that high.
You’d think it would be easy, endearing to readers, a protagonist who feels excluded in an elite space, particularly if you agree that every human being has at some point feared exclusion. And yet, I’ve noticed that audiences sometimes approach a character in this predicament with a certain stinginess, a certain lack of generosity. My working theory is that when we experience a character whose exclusion feels profound, whose envy is working on overtime, whose recognition of the divide between those who have and those who do not is ultra-clear, we, the audience, the reader, are confronted with our own terror of non-belonging. We must, therefore, intellectualize. We must find reasons why we could never, ever be the person on the page or the screen. We would not allow ourselves to be put in such a vulnerable position. We would leave the elite space that threatens our sanity, our livelihood, our life. We would be smart. Creating a protagonist who can cradle readers’ unconscious defenses while simultaneously pulling them forward is no easy feat.
My novel Man’s Best Friend follows a long established canon of ordinary people keenly feeling their lack in elite environments: Rebecca, The Great Gatsby, The Talented Mr.Ripley, and of course, Saltburn. The protagonist of my book knows what it feels like to be an outsider. El was a scholarship kid at a tony Manhattan private school; now 30, she’s a failed actress with nothing going on for her. Until she meets Bryce, a mysterious trust fund heir who can give her the access to the life she’s always wanted. But of course, everything comes at a price…
In this reading list, I present seven novels with eight different protagonists, women and men of ordinary means who find themselves in elite spaces, in homes and universities and glittering cities with great concentrations of wealth and power. What I love about each of these protagonists is how unique they each feel; how their primary struggle is the same, but the worlds they come from and the worlds to which they would belong vary. Some of these characters primarily grapple with non-belonging around money; for others, their sense of non-belonging also encompasses their race or gender or sexual orientation. A protagonist finding themselves in a highly privileged, historically exclusionary space is an age-old trope for a reason: because even as it provokes fear, it inspires. We each have felt alien and inferior at some time or another, and might again, and, like these characters, we have only one choice—to survive.
Anita de Monte & Raquel Toro of Anita de Monte Laughs Last by Xochitl Gonzalez
Xoachtil Gonzalez’s excellent Anita de Monte Laughs Last features three narrators, but only two of these are narrators who come from a place of lesser privilege and find themselves in highly privileged spaces. The first of these is Anita de Monte, a Cuban American conceptual artist who navigates the predominately white and male world of fine art in the late ‘70s and ‘80s. Despite her obvious talent, Anita contends with being undervalued—even, at times, unseen—due to her marriage to Jack Martin, a famous, white minimalist sculptor. And when Anita, thanks to her unflagging commitment to her truth, does finally begin to flourish—when she begins to be seen as more than a token, as more than Jack’s wife—then disaster strikes. It’s Raquel, a Puerto Rican, first-generation college student at Brown University, who rescues Anita de Monte’s art and story from obscurity. Raquel, surrounded by Ivy League white privilege in the form of her rich boyfriend, her art history professor and some truly terrible classmates, has some idea of how suffocated Anita must have felt as a Latinx woman trying to break through in the cold drawing rooms and galleries of white collectors and curators. First-hand, Raquel witnesses the way people with power and money modify history to their liking, the way they close ranks around people like Jack Martin; it’s difficult stuff, but, as the title suggests, Anita (and Raquel) get the last laugh.
Alex of The Guest by Emma Cline
Emma Cline’s The Guest offers little in the way of backstory about its protagonist, Alex, but the immediacy of Alex’s predicament saddles the audience to her well-being better than any sappy origin story ever could. Alex, who’s been making her living as an escort, is asked to leave the Hamptons home of Simon, her boyfriend, and she has nowhere to go. Back in Manhattan, her former lovers slash clients are through with her, and, on top of that, she stole from a man in the city who’s hunting for her. She decides the best thing to do is wait it out in the Hamptons for a week, crashing wherever she can until she can show up, oh-so-casually, at Simon’s Labor Day party. Equally if not more compelling than Alex’s encounters with the home owners and trust fund brats of East Hampton are her encounters with the other have-nots, the working and middle-class nannies and home organizers. Take this moment when a babysitter discovers Alex floating naked in her employer’s pool: “How did the look Karen gave Alex seem to contain everything? Knowledge of exactly what kind of person Alex was.” Alex’s superpower is her ability to adapt, to slip, chameleon-like, into whatever role she need play to get by: these moments when her invulnerability is punctured fascinate because they suggest that any outsider in this elite world might, at any time, themselves breach the divide between who they are and who they might pretend to be. What’s keeping the ordinary folks on their side of the line, in other words, besides a sense of obligation to the rules, to propriety? But—and one has to imagine Alex has used this very question to justify her own behavior at some point or another—why should less privileged people have to observe the rules when privileged people break them all the time? Surely it’s not a commitment to propriety that begets trust funds and oceanfront properties. Alex may not be especially knowable, but Cline makes it so we follow her avidly all the same.
Samantha Heather Mackey of Bunny by Mona Awad
Raquel Toro of Anita de Monte Laughs Last and Samantha Heather Mackey of Bunny are both working-class students who find themselves in the clutches of Brown University. (To be fair, the University in Bunny is called Warren, but this veil is strictly nominal. Author Mona Awad attended Brown’s MFA program, so at the very least we can say Brown may have inspired Bunny’s setting.) The more significant similarity between Anita de Monte Laughs Last and Bunny, though, is the incorporation of magical realism; in both novels the device works beautifully, though in Bunny it serves to bolster the main character’s unreliability. Samantha Heather Mackey fixates on a clique of young women, her peers in the Narrative Arts department, who all call one another “Bunny”. This feels grounded enough, until Samantha is invited to spend time with the Bunnies and learns that, coven-like, they’ve been gathering to explode actual bunnies in order to make young men appear—Hybrids, Drafts, Darlings, the men are called. And the magical realism doesn’t stop there. The reader is left guessing, until the final sentence, how reliable Samantha might be, and whether the intense isolation she describes at the beginning of the novel has somehow driven her to imagine some or all of the novel’s events. A common shape in a horror story is for the protagonist to discover that they, rather than their environment, are the locus of danger, but that doesn’t seem to be what Bunny is saying: whatever Samantha Heather Mackey’s truth, it’s obvious that the privileged environment she’s trapped in has an inherent toxicity.
Cushla of Trespasses by Louise Kennedy
In her gorgeous debut, Trespasses, Louise Kennedy gives us Cushla, a young Catholic school teacher living in Northern Ireland during the Troubles. Cushla’s family own a bar in a small town outside Belfast: they’re middle-class, better off than many other Catholics in the area, though the threat of violence and certainly the threat of discrimination toward all Catholics hangs over the story. Cushla glimpses life on the other side when she becomes involved with a married Protestant barrister, Michael Agnew. Michael is sympathetic to the Catholic experience, having made a career for himself defending members of the IRA. He and his well-off Protestant friends even have a regular “Irish night.” And yet, Cushla finds herself thinking of Michael: “Did he really think they were not so different? Cushla’s grandfather had been a teenage runaway… had left the streets for a tree-lined avenue on which his Protestant neighbors considered his gains ill-gotten and kept their distance… Michael’s grandparents were likely to have been among the disapproving neighbors.” Only from a place of less privilege can one really grasp how wide the gulf really is between where one is and where one could never really belong. The descriptions of Irish Night, how out of place Cushla feels among Michael’s Protestant peers, are heartbreaking in their precision. Nothing in this novel is overdrawn, and it’s precisely this close, sensible style that makes it such an enlightening read.
Richard Papen of The Secret History by Donna Tartt
Here’s a weird thing about Donna Tartt’s The Secret History I really like: Hampden College, the Vermont school the protagonist, Richard Papen, absolutely kills himself to get into, is not the best of the best. It’s elite, yes, but at some point Tartt acknowledges, and Papen is forced to hear, that for a number of Richard’s wealthy classmates, Hampden was simply the best they could do. Hampden is the sort of college, for example, willing to admit someone like Richard’s classmate Henry, who only completed the tenth grade and refused to take standardized tests. This detail is so telling because it demonstrates just how much Richard’s perspective differs from that of his cohort, the sons and daughters of the very rich who make up much of the student body, and especially from the people who become his close friends, a small group who study Ancient Greek under the brilliant but cunning Julian Morrow. Richard Papen is more observer than advantage-taker among his wealthy new friends, more Nick Carraway than Tom Ripley. For his restraint, Richard is rewarded; Henry, the most well-off of Nick’s new friends, becomes very fond of Richard, comparing him favorably, it would seem, to Bunny, a longstanding member of the group who is cash-poor and takes advantage wherever he can. The Secret History is a slow burn, but Donna Tartt keeps the reader engaged with her exceedingly ordinary protagonist nonetheless, exposing us to the highs and lows of adapting to an unfamiliar, overwhelming and at times dangerous elite environment.
Louise of Social Creature by Tara Isabella Burton
Louise, the main character of Social Creature, is not so much drawn into the world of the elite as she is dragged in by the throat. Not that Louise objects. She loves the obsessive attention of Lavinia, her new trust-funded friend. Mostly loves it. Lavinia can be tiring and needy, and Louise feels this even more once Lavinia insists Louise move into the empty bedroom at her place on the Upper East Side. Louise begins taking cash from Lavinia, a little at a time: in Louise’s mind, this is not stealing, per se, just a balancing of the books. Lavinia needs so much from Louise, all the time. But things take a turn, as they are wont to do in toxic friendships. An ordinary character penetrating an elite space is often confronted with a moment like this, one in which they must decide how far they’re willing to go to hold onto the world they’ve (intentionally or unintentionally) gained access to, and all the incredible clothes and the incredible connections therein. Louise, who begins the novel working three jobs simultaneously and who dreads the day when she might have to admit defeat and return to her parents, chooses to go very, very far.
Nick Guest of The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst
Within Nick Guest’s very name, Alan Hollinghurst provides evidence of Nick’s defining role as an outsider. The novel spans a period of four years when Nick, a middle-class graduate of Oxford, lives with the well-off family of one of his Oxford classmates, Toby Fedden, at their home in Notting Hill. This arrangement is initially meant to be temporary, but Nick is so helpful to the Feddens as a minder and friend to Cat, Toby’s troubled younger sister, that he stays on. Although Gerald, Toby’s father, is a Conservative MP, he and the rest of the family are aware that Nick is gay. For much of the book, politics and sexuality are danced around figuratively (and, at one point, literally, when a coked-up Nick dances with Margaret Thatcher at a party for the Feddens’ wedding anniversary). Nick’s overall position is easy to empathize with, although the close third-person narration offers insight into Nick’s preoccupation with the material, with the Feddens’ space: one can imagine Patricia Highsmith writing these passages from Tom Ripley’s point of view. For example:
“And Nick was in residence, and almost, he felt, in possession. He loved coming home to Kensington Park Gardens in the early evening, when the wide treeless street was raked by the sun, and the two white terraces stared at each other with the glazed tolerance of rich neighbors. He loved letting himself in at the three-locked green front door, and locking it again behind him… He saw himself…showing the house to a new friend… as if it was really his own, or would be one day: the pictures, the porcelain, the curvy French furniture so different from what he’d been brought up with.”
In Nick, Hollinghurst conjures a protagonist caught, for a time, in an unthinkably exclusive world, and Nick is as obsessed by the beauty therein as he is tortured by the hypocrisy.
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