The Audacity

April 2, 2024 - Soho Press

LONGLISTED FOR THE JOYCE CAROL OATES PRIZE

A bracing satire about the implosion of a Theranos-like company, a collapsing marriage, and a billionaires’ “philanthropy summit,” for fans of Hari Kunzru and The White Lotus.

In 72 hours, a blockbuster exposé will reveal Victoria Stevens’ multibillion-dollar startup as a massive fraud. And Victoria has gone missing. Has she faked her death, leaving her husband Guy Sarvananthan to face the fallout—and potential jail time? Should Guy flee to his native Sri Lanka, an outcast and a failure? Or embrace denial? Why not: He takes the corporate jet to a private Caribbean island, where the 0.0001% have gathered to decide which one of the world’s biggest problems to “eradicate forever.”  Guy drinks and drugs his way into oblivion, through manicured jungles and aboard superyachts, amid captains of industry, legions of staff, and unlikely saboteurs. Meanwhile, Victoria narrates her side of the story from an off-the-grid location in the California desert. In scribbled diary entries shot through with cultish self-help mantras, she plots her comeback, confident she’ll prove everyone wrong. Again.

Ryan Chapman’s incisive novel is a swan dive into the abyss and “Martin Amis’s Money for really late, late capitalism” (Amitava Kumar, author of A Time Outside This Time).

[ Read excerpts from the novel in The Brooklyn Rail & in Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading ]
[ Read interviews about the novel in Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Lincoln Michel’s Counter Craft, Literary Hub, & The Orange County Register ]

If you’d like to purchase a copy, my favorite local indies are Oblong Books and Rough Draft. You can also purchase via:

The audiobook edition, narrated by Vikas Adam, is available through HighBridge and the usual retailers.

Praise

Lit Hub’s Most Anticipated Books of 2024
A Town & Country Must-Read Book for Spring
The Millions’ Most Anticipated Books of Spring
BOMB Magazine Editor’s Choice

“Chapman’s skewering of the rich, the very rich and the ultrarich as they debate the world’s ills is as incisive as it is hilarious.”
—The Washington Post

“Delicious satire.”
—Vanity Fair

“Hilarious . . . Chapman’s sharp humor earns him that place among the master satirists.”
—Lit Hub

“Chapman proves his staying power as a shrewd and suspenseful satirist in his second novel . . . Chapman conveys malignant excess, arrogance, and greed in scenes of dizzying apocalyptic detail and acid humor.”
—Booklist

“If you enjoy your satire blistering, your characters memorable and your prose searing, you’ve come to the right place.”
—Inside Hook

“The uncanniness of Chapman’s meticulously engineered satire allows us to briefly glimpse into the lives of characters most of us might never even bump up against, let alone weekend with on a private island. His depictions show that, just like in real life, all these extravagances are performative . . . The Audacity uses sharp satire and dark humor to heighten the absurdity of these figures and institutions. Readers remain on the outside looking in, but Chapman breaks the spell imposed by the powerful.”
—BOMB Magazine (Editor’s Choice)

“The Audacity is often wickedly funny . . . Like the contemporary first cousin of a classic American novel, The Great Gatsby.”
—The Anniston Star

“[Chapman] is among the decade’s sharpest satirists . . . Chapman’s love of language shines line by line, working wonders with wordplay in the latest tech speak and TED Talk argot. It’s a parody from the jump, but not without narrative substance and pathos that underlies the immigrant experience, specifically, and more broadly: the struggle to thrive as an artist, let alone survive as a decent, if not content, adult in America.”
—Style Weekly

“[Chapman] has a keen eye for the foibles of the new gilded age.”
—Kirkus Reviews

“Fearless, irreverent, and so very funny, The Audacity skewers the ego-driven disruption culture of the uber rich. Chapman is a master of satire, and his hilarious runs are threaded through with moving looks at American identity, grief, self-loathing and self-worth. This is a dark, timely, super smart book.”
—Kimberly King Parsons, author of Black Light and We Were the Universe

“There are funny books, and then there is the occasional novel that actually makes you cackle—which I did, repeatedly, as I read Ryan Chapman’s The Audacity. It’s a satire that hits on the line level, sparing none of its characters or observation from its skewering wit. Timely in its reference points, but timeless in what it says about the relationship between America, inequality, and cultural assimilation, this book is A Modest Proposal by way of Succession.”
—Kevin Nguyen, author of New Waves

“Equal parts Sam Lipsyte and Don DeLillo, The Audacity is razor-sharp satire about the lowlifes of high tech and the absurdity of our present reality. Chapman’s prose overflows with verve, wit, and intelligence, but he never forgets the tender, beating heart at the core. I tore through the book with laughter and envy.”
—Lincoln Michel, author of The Body Scout

“Almost exactly a hundred years later, this is The Great Gatsby, updated. This is the art of the affluent we want. The excesses of the lives of the idealistic or deluded or avaricious super-rich might all be false but what is certainly real is the energy on each page of this novel. The only way to blurb this book is simply quote from it. Martin Amis’s Money for really late, late capitalism.”
—Amitava Kumar, author of A Time Outside This Time and My Beloved Life

 “Ryan Chapman’s outstanding comic sensibility is matched by acrobatic prose of the first rank. The Audacity is an immersively entertaining, tightly controlled bullet of a novel.”
—Teddy Wayne, author of Loner and The Winner

“Ryan Chapman cavorts amidst the twisted wreckage of our zeitgeist like it’s his own rollicking funhouse. The Audacity is a tragicomic thrill ride that tips a trick-filled hat to postmodernists past as it delivers its devastating cultural critique. The smartest, most enjoyable novel I’ve read all year.”
—David Goodwillie, author of Kings County

“With The Audacity, Ryan Chapman has perfected the art of satire in a decidedly post-satire era. It is delicate work to mine humor from the daily bathos of Silicon Valley superachievers and their gnomic lusts, but with a surfeit of literary tools at his disposal, Chapman has done it. Employing the sector-specific fluencies of David Foster Wallace, the deadpan whimsy of Douglas Coupland, the intoxicated bite of early Martin Amis, and the postmodern empathy of Jennifer Egan, Chapman has conjured a tragicomic tech dystopia from an Onion headline, a hyper-capitalist wasteland populated by fleece-vested minor gods who haven’t quite realized they’ve already fallen from grace.”
—Jonny Diamond, editor of Literary Hub