You’ve been avidly watching the second season of the 10-time Emmy-winning HBO series The White Lotus – set, this time, at a palace hotel in Sicily – hanging on the mystery teased in the first episode: whose dead body was that floating in the water? But after this Sunday’s finale, your vicarious travels will be over, the mystery presumably solved. Soon enough, the ennui will be seeping in at the same rate as the schadenfreude is seeping out.
Your thirst for acerbic social satire about the insufferable rich – something with a soupçon of vengeance, generational conflict, depravity and death, all in an escapist holiday setting – remains unquenched. If the “You liked that, so you’re definitely going love this” algorithm is just spitting out wan facsimiles, how about filling that void with a book? The past century alone offers plenty to choose from. Some possibilities to get you started:
The Talented Mr. Ripley, Patricia Highsmith
Supplied
(WW Norton, 288 pages)
Privilege, envy, obsession, murder – Highsmith’s best-known novel has it all. The class commentary here is subtle and characteristically transgressive in that what initially seems like a confirmation of WASP entitlement becomes all about the superficiality of it. Things start off when struggling prole and confidence man Tom Ripley gets himself hired by shipping magnate Herbert Greenleaf to lure his louche son Dickie away from permanent vacation in Italy so he can come take his proper place in the family business. Unable to gain acceptance in Dickie’s tight-knit group of pals, Tom murders Dickie, then slips into the latter’s shoes, and indeed his entire wardrobe, by assuming his identity. The clothes do make the man, apparently: Tom convinces himself he is Dickie to the degree that he can hardly bear to reassume his true identity when forced to get the police off his trail. The 1990s English film version, with Jude Law, is good, the 1960s French one, Purple Noon (Plein soleil), with the dangerous, delectable Alain Delon, even better.
A Room with a View, E.M. Forster
Supplied
(Penguin Classics, 256 pages)
Forster’s novel begins with a complaint about a room in hotel (see: White Lotus Season 1) in Italy, and goes on to offer a master-class in class-based passive-aggression. Not only is young Lucy Honeychurch’s room at the Pensione Bertolini lacking a view, worse, there’s a Cockney next door! (“This might as well be London,” she moans.) Catching wind of this disaster, Mr. Emerson, her freethinking fellow guest, insists on trading his nephew George’s rooms-with-a-view for Lucy’s – no strings attached, a view just isn’t that important to them. Lucy’s bossy cousin-chaperone, Charlotte, initially declines the offer in the face of what she perceives as Mr. Emerson’s brutal indelicacy (subtext: he’s “a mechanic of some sort,” and likely a socialist), but the rooms are eventually exchanged, a murder witnessed and love found after Lucy’s eyes are opened to her people’s closed-minded snobbery. The take-away: To access passion, Brits should go abroad, and avoid their own like the plague.
The Feast, Margaret Kennedy
Supplied
(Simon & Schuster, 336 pages)
In the preface to Margaret Kennedy’s sharply observed novel – originally published in 1950 and recently reissued by Faber – we learn that a cliff has collapsed on the family-run Pendizack Manor Hotel in postwar Cornwall, England, entombing guests and owner alike under a heap of giant boulders. (All are presumed dead, and no efforts made to rescue them.) A deep sense of foreboding thus hangs over the playful, witty story that ensues, involving the friendships and romances of seven characters – each subtly based on one of the seven deadly sins – at the hotel shortly before disaster struck. One is trying to get her husband to move to Guernsey to avoid paying income tax. Another, an aspiring novelist, pretends to be a cockney “from the slums” to impress the object of his affections: “People think more of you if you’ve risen from the gutter. But a home like mine is impossible to get away from.”
Second Place, Rachel Cusk
Supplied
(HarperCollins, 192 pages)
Guests behaving badly takes on a new meaning in Cusk’s most recent novel, based on an account of D.H. Lawrence’s disastrous stay at a New Mexico artists’ colony in the 1920s. The setting is the marshland home of a writer named M, who has invited L, a painter she doesn’t know but whose work she admired years ago in Paris, to come stay at her guest house. Her stated hope is that L will paint the marsh; her secret one, that he’ll paint her. Instead, L shows up with Brett, a beautiful young heiress, and sequesters himself to the guest house. He treats L, for whom he has obvious contempt, as if she were staff. Hostilities escalate. In a highly memorable scene late in the novel, L looks in the guesthouse’s curtainless windows and sees M and Brett fiendishly laughing, their half-clothed bodies covered with paint. L is painting, directly onto the walls of the guest house, the image of a plump, middle-aged Eve – a figure clearly meant to be M – in a hellish Garden of Eden surrounded by grotesquely sexualized flora. Careful what you wish for I guess.
A Children’s Bible, Lydia Millet
Supplied
(WW Norton, 240 pages)
It’s a sign of the times that many of the more recent books on this list double as cli-fi (a.k.a. climate fiction, if you haven’t been keeping up), including Millet’s novel, about a group of ex-college chums, now grown-up (sort of) denizens of the over-educated middle-upper class – artists, doctors, architects, profs – who reunite (Big Chill-style, but with kids), at a grand rented summer house of unclear proprietorship built by an unnamed robber baron. They’re the kind of people who splurge on Fendi handbags, drink dry martinis, and dutifully correct their children when they use outdated nomenclature that disrespects “Native Americans.” But the children, 12 in all, are repulsed by what they see as their elders’ lameness, especially after the latter respond to a series of calamities, including the flooding of the house, by doubling down on their debauchery. Drugs, orgies and booze, you name it, anything to blot out the vision of a world their generation set on fire.
The Pink Hotel, Liska Jacobs
Supplied
(MCD, 336 pages)
In Jacobs’s novel, published earlier this year, a young white couple of modest background arrive at a swish Los Angeles hotel for their honeymoon and immediately realize they have divergent ideas about their supposedly shared future. Keith, the arriviste of the pair, reveals that he’s hell-bent on getting a job at the hotel, whose clientele consists of climate-denying magnates of various stripes (oil, finance, shipping, trailer parks) and their Veuve Clicquot-swilling, Hermes-wearing wives. Kit, though fascinated by her surroundings, was counting on a return to small-town life in Boonville (the name a tad sledgehammerish). But none of it matters, because everything goes to hell when the dry hills around them become engulfed in flames. A condensed version of environmental apocalypse sequence follows: rolling blackouts, curfews, riots, looting etc. Outside the hotel gates lumpens scream for access that will never be granted; all that’s missing is the pitchforks. Inside, the bacchanal naturally escalates, all while the orchestra strikes up a waltz (remind you of anything?).
The Disaster Tourist, Yun Ko-eun
Supplied
(Counterpoint, 208 pages)
Originally published in Korean in 2013, Yun’s novel – call it a late-capitalist eco-thriller if “cli-fi” doesn’t do it for you – made its debut in English in 2020, its scathing critique of consumerism having apparently survived the translation process intact. Protagonist Yona works for a travel agency called Jungle, where her job is to scan the headlines for “natural” disasters – floods, earthquakes, hurricanes (though most, of course, have a man-made component) – that she can package into tours for her FOMO-afflicted thrill-seeking clients. The absurdist plot finds another gear when Yona is sent to the faraway island of Mui, where she’s tasked with sexing-up a sinkhole attraction that’s no longer pulling in tourists as it once did. A wild, surreal conglomeration of events ensues, as locals show themselves willing to go to disturbing, self-injurious lengths to rescue their economy.