The Unfortunates

McManus's first novel is a biting satire of the idle rich. Cecilia "CeCe" Somner, a rubber industry heiress in her 70s, enters an experimental clinical trial to cure her Parkinson's-like tremors. While she is away, her troubled adult son, George, spends his time writing the libretto for a dystopian opera. When he can't find anyone to produce it, he tells his wife, Iris, a onetime punk musician, that he will raise the money on his own. His sister lives in Rio with her architect wife and refuses to visit CeCe because she is pregnant and they are estranged. As CeCe goes through her clinical trial, George neglects his job working for an arts foundation in order to finish his opera. Unfortunate choices are made, with terrible repercussions for CeCe, George, and Iris that perhaps not even vast sums of money can rectify. The author writes with subtle wit about the culturally isolated 1% and sends up the gargoyle-esque CeCe, who is out of step with contemporary society. This leaves readers to identify with Iris, the outsider to this world of incredible, indecent privilege. Only near the end does McManus falter in asking us to see the fates visited upon her characters as tragic. Despite this, she has found a new way to dramatize Fitzgerald's oft-quoted statement, "The rich are different from you and me." (June)