PrevYou is the hottest startup in Silicon Valley—a marvel of medical technology with billions of venture capital behind its claims that the cure for cancer is at hand. The only problem? The claims are phony, and ProPublica is about to publish an expose revealing the truth about the company.
This ripped-from-the-headlines premise for the American novelist Ryan Chapman’s sophomore effort, The Audacity (Soho Press, 2024), will feel familiar to readers who followed the downfall of blood-testing startup Theranos and its founder, Elizabeth Holmes. Chapman uses the imminent collapse of the business to craft a pair of opposing character studies. There’s Victoria Stevens, the CEO of PrevYou, who faces the impossible collision between her own ambition and the cold reality of failure. The other, enjoying the lifestyle and elite circles her status affords him, is Guy Savanathan, a Sri Lankan immigrant (Chapman is half) and former wedding pianist with the seeming luck of being Victoria’s husband.
Incongruence is just part of Chapman’s admixture of satire. In his 2019 debut Riots I Have Known, Chapman has his narrator (also half–Sri Lankan) stationed in the calm of an empty prison library as a jail break rages outside its doors. The entire conceit, both ridiculous and entertaining, works because it’s completely made up, his target the abstracted American prison system.
With Stevens, however, Chapman has taken up the challenge of lampooning the living—the disgraced and jailed Holmes. It raises the stakes of the work: on the one hand, he has the opportunity to be more cutting; on the other, it’s possible to miss the mark entirely. It doesn’t take too many broad jokes to want to put a book down.
Chapman has a promising start in Victoria, deftly capturing the supposed brilliance of the Silicon Valley startup doyen. Victoria’s delusional self-importance cultivates an almost messianic belief in herself that she is nearing a world-changing breakthrough, a conviction so powerful that others end up believing it too. People give her money, lots of it, expecting almost nothing in return but the occasional progress update.
On the verge of the expose’s publication, Victoria fakes her own death in a kayaking accident. Now in hiding and unable to admit mistakes in her downfall, she instead tries to come up with an idea so big that everyone will forget about the fraud. This includes journaling, which begin as records of her long-distance runs:
Successfully accounted for two-minute sunrise lag. After mile fifteen my vision shimmered and the pain bloomed into an elevated homeostasis. The Zone of Utmost Throb was perceptible, but brief. I may need to dehydrate more. Make a note to temper the magnesium water.
Then, as the novel moves on and Victoria seeks further escape from reality, there are dalliances with her drug dealer:
Later we drank lemonade on the porch. “You have to add the lemon rinds,” I told him. Then I told him to masturbate: I wanted to see the motion of his arm muscles at work. He rain checked: “Indica dick.”
A counter to Victoria is Guy, who Chapman uses to gleefully explore Victoria’s elite milieu. Unlike Victoria’s meta-documentary narration, Guy’s parts are written in a more traditional third. He’s long since left behind the musical studies that took him from Minneapolis to the conservatory in Philly. In exchange, he’s now running Victoria’s philanthropic office and going through the motions of the charity gala circuit. Wealth, shall we say, suits him: he’s introduced as the sort of man whose Brioni tux is his fourth-favorite tuxedo, “Possibly fifth.” It’s a cushy gig, until Victoria goes missing and he’s left to answer for her disappearance.
In a different sort of novel, the relationship between Guy and Victoria might be at the heart of the story. Considering the way their seemingly comfortable, if distant, marriage quickly turns to contempt and antipathy, scenes from it might beat with intrigue. As Guy notes: “Sex with Victoria was routine, which wasn’t to say joyless. More a long-running Broadway musical, with tight choreography and dependable results.”
But Victoria is incapable of feeling any remorse for what she’s put her husband through, and even her attempts at pity quickly turn to scorn and character assassination. “He should be grateful,” she writes of him. “Did he ever wonder how far he would have gotten on his own?” Guy, too, aware of the PrevYou’s eminent collapse, ponders back: “Perhaps this was his problem, Victoria had created [a story] for him which he mistook as an actual life. . . . He could create a new story, but what would that even look like? Reinvention was a young man’s game.”
Without them in scene together, it’s difficult to imagine them as a couple. The only present-day interaction we see between the two of them is the text message from Victoria that opens the novel: “The necessary breakthroughs did not occur within the expected or justifiable life cycle of the product.” It’s the closest Victoria comes to offering an apology, or at least an explanation, for sucking him into her scheme. Their marriage instead reads like a transactional receipt; Guy admits, after a few drinks, that neither of them were the great love of the other’s life.
The discovery that PrevYou is a fraud leaves Guy reeling from the betrayal. But he refuses to play the part of the dutiful husband (and possible fall guy). Instead of flying out to California to help search for Victoria, he borrows her corporate jet to fly down to a private island hosting a conference—or “Quorum”—of the mega-wealthy, nominally dedicated to deciding which of the world’s problems to try and solve with their combined trillions. What he leaves behind is the premise of the novel.
So off we go to visit the zoo of the ultra-wealthy and gawk at these neurotic animals in a painstakingly manicured facsimile of their natural habitat. We’re back in Chapman’s comfort zone, examining the absurdity of a subject writ large: see the guests making close inspection of their seemingly identical living quarters and trying to trade up based on microscopic differences; shake your head at the absurdity of the anarcho-libertarian’s mega-yacht stationed offshore because she wasn’t officially invited; smile knowingly at the rumors of a “quorum within a quorum,” a reminder that even among the most powerful and exclusive, there is always a fear that someone else out there is more powerful and more exclusive.
It’s funny, but the more Chapman lingers here, the more abstracted his characters and plot become. Chapman seems to want to position Guy as a modern-day Nick Carraway, observing the dramas of the West Egg set without quite being one of them. But in the absence of a Gatsby and a Daisy on the island, none of the other characters rise to the level of requiring any emotional investment in their story. Guy doesn’t seem to want much beyond what he calls “high-alcohol palliative care.” Victoria is so desperate for escape that when she writes near the end that the next run might be “the run,” you’d think she means running right out of the novel itself.
It’s not that Chapman doesn’t know how to control a story. Riots I Have Known showcased his talent for suspenseful narrative that kept readers rapt. Stretches of this book are hilarious, no doubt owing to his strong prose stylist, his observations sharp and well-drawn. But Victoria is in hiding from the start and the anticipated reveal by ProPublica is a wait for Godot. How different perhaps if Victoria had spent time at the Quorum only to depart from it, or even made a reappearance by the end (she doesn’t). What new narrative possibilities could have been opened if the ProPublica story broke midway through the novel? Cleverness and wit can only carry an inert novel for so long. A strong drink helps to finish one regardless.
