Scams, frauds and misbehaving billionaires gave Ryan Chapman ‘The Audacity’

Married couple Victoria Stevens and Guy Sarvananthan — the antiheroes of Ryan Chapman’s comic novel, “The Audacity” — are deep in denial.

Victoria is preparing for the collapse of her company, PrevYou, which promises gullible customers a cure for cancer; an ​​exposé is due to come out exposing the outfit as fraudulent. That’s bad news for Guy, who has become all too used to the sweet life on the gala circuit.

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Victoria disappears, faking her death and decamping to Joshua Tree while Guy flies out to the Quorum, a conference for the ultra-rich on a private island, turning to heroic levels of alcohol and drugs in a desperate attempt to make his troubles go away.

“The Audacity” — which follows his 2019 debut novel, “Riots I Have Known” — was partially a product of the COVID-19 pandemic, Chapman says. “The pandemic was such a time where so many of us had our bells rung,” he recalls. “I just got really fascinated by how people react when they think their world’s falling apart.”

Denial is a part of that, too. “In the early days of the pandemic, people who were in New York and Seattle and L.A. and Miami were getting the outbreaks first,” he says. “And then I would talk to relatives in the Midwest and there was this inability to understand the new reality.”

Chapman answered questions about “The Audacity” via telephone from his home in Kingston, New York. This conversation has been condensed and edited for length and clarity.

Q: How did the idea for this novel occur to you?

It definitely started from one of the more obvious sources, Elizabeth Holmes and the Theranos story. I’d been tracking it, and then I read John Carreyrou’s excellent book, “Bad Blood.” But I’ve been really interested in scams and frauds for a long time. Even before the Elizabeth Holmes scandal, in a previous career when I was working at arts nonprofits, that’s a nice window, with their galas and fundraisers, into millionaires and billionaires. That’s their social world and so many nonprofits are dependent on it. It was fascinating to see how those nonprofits were used for reputational whitewashing.

I was interested in people who live without guardrails, whether that’s because they’re sociopathic or because they have enough money that there are fewer consequences. As in my last book, I’m more interested not in how the best and bravest among us act in desperate times, but in how people who might have some monstrousness to them, what their contradictions and nuances are when they think their world is ending. And I just didn’t see too many books about that. A lot of the writers I admire explore that, but I just wasn’t seeing a lot of that in some of the newer stuff out there. So I thought, “OK, well, I can maybe make this my own project for a few years and see if there’s something there.”

Q: The character Guy in this book and the narrator of your first book “Riots I Have Known” are both people who have failed spectacularly in life. What is it about that kind of massively flawed person that interests you more than people who are successful and have it all?

I think that failure teaches you more. We learn from struggle more than we learn from coasting, and there’s just a lot of inherent friction there. And since I’m interested in the comic, there’s just so much more to mine from someone who is flailing about rather than someone who is just on the ascent.

I told one of my editors a few years ago that I was interested in writing about the ultra-wealthy. And he was like, “Don’t do it. No one cares.” I like being told that something is a bad idea, and then just hitting my nose against the grindstone until maybe it works. But even the films and the novels I love are always about someone who’s on the decline or whose life is a disaster. I don’t know what that says about me.

Q: As a comic author, it must have been fun for you to write about Victoria, who is so hugely delusional.

There’s certain aspects of both Victoria and Guy that are drawn from, I’ll just say diplomatically, some of my relatives, and they’re people that I love, but their way of moving through the world is very profoundly different from how I move through the world. Victoria’s idea is that when she thinks she’s figured out enough of the world, she doesn’t need to learn anymore. It’s admittedly kind of a difficult voice to write in, and I think that’s why her voice in the book only shows up in these brief chapters. 

I think if there was a whole novel with just her voice it might be too punishing. She’s also informed by my reading a lot of billionaires’ memoirs, because they all recast slightly illegal early business cases as exemplars of how they were always going to be victorious. And I think, “Well, no, you just got lucky that the cops or the investigators didn’t catch you in time. You’re not a genius. You’re just lucky.”

Q: What’s it like writing satire in an age where everything seems completely off the rails all the time?

It’s very exciting. You do feel like you’re at least tuned into the world, and then there are small risks where there were aspects of the novel draft that I thought were cartoonish that would then come true in the real world, and I would have to rewrite those. It got down to the point where there was one part where they were talking about how one billionaire passed away that I rewrote so many times that when it was in edits, I kind of asked my editor, Mark Doten, “Do I have to change this again? I can’t think of a 30th way for a billionaire to die.” And he was like, “Just leave it in. It’s fine.”

So there is that sense that if you write satire, the absurd reality will catch up faster than you think. So that’s a small risk. I do think that what feels absurd and then what feels “realistic” do tend to blur and commingle, and so that if you tried to describe the top 10 news articles of a day to someone from 15 years ago, they would think that you are describing “Dr. Strangelove” or something just utterly bonkers. But we tend to become inured to how strange the world is, and how absurdity feels quotidian. I want writing to remind us of how absurd the world is, both in good and bad ways. The world is wondrous, but we can’t sleepwalk through the crazy, chaotic times.