They call it the “nest,” and it has bent their lives. The four Plumb siblings will inherit a nice big trust fund when the youngest of them turns forty, in a few months. The Goodbye Look is one of Macdonald’s best, a tightly plotted and beautifully written jigsaw puzzle. Lew Archer can’t resist trying to help the unfortunate fortunate. This is a theme of several of Macdonald’s novels. The wealthy Chalmers family has wayward offspring and repressed guilt and generation-old, dark family secrets and we vividly see how greed can damage families for decades. His P.I., Lew Archer, is hired by the patriarch of an idle rich family (poor families, see, don’t have patriarchs) to look into the robbery of a gold box filled with letters. Ross Macdonald was a great detective novelist, in some ways superior to his better-known compatriots, Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett. It’s clumsily written, but it’s a breathtaking, appalling narrative. This account takes dysfunctional to a whole new level. The well-researched, sensational story of the Johnsons, known as “the most dysfunctional family in the Fortune 500.” Their enormous wealth (Johnson & Johnson, founded in 1877, makes baby powder and Band Aids and a thousand other consumer products, and oh by the way, they also sell opioids) has led to familial unhappiness, haunted private lives, and tabloid scandals: battles over wills and paternity, divorces and drug overdoses, adultery, kidnappings, suicide, and murder-for-hire. Jerry Oppenheimer, Crazy Rich: Power, Scandal and Tragedy Inside the Johnson & Johnson Dynasty And all of this told in felicitous prose. There’s nothing like a wedding to catalyze trouble in a troubled family.
Dad has to learn how to let his daughter go meanwhile, he lusts after one of the bridesmaids while fighting with his younger daughter.
On a remote, Nantucket-like island in New England, an old-money WASP family, the Van Meters, are hosting a wedding for Winn Van Meter’s pregnant elder daughter, Daphne.
It was the basis for a lively 2018 movie adaptation. There’s a controlling mother, blood-curdling snobbery, questionable paternity, vicious gossip, hostile relatives, and lies. This is a world of private jets with yoga studios on board and Matisses hanging in the cabins. A twisty, elegant thriller.Īn American-born Chinese woman from modest circumstances goes with her boyfriend to Singapore to meet his family-who turn out to be stratospherically rich-in a novel that’s part rom-com and part soap opera with a little Mean Girls thrown in. Alger is a fine writer who freely dispenses authentic insider details about the life of the top 1/10th of 1 percent on the Upper East Side, the cavernous Park Avenue apartments and the weekends in the Hamptons. A corruption scandal and an SEC investigation pit family members against one another and test familial loyalties. Paul Ross, an attorney, has married into the billionaire Darling family, which is, of course, dysfunctional, in interesting ways. Here are a few of my favorite books about screwed-up rich families. They may have a lot more money than me, you think, but at least they’re unhappy. We get a perverse pleasure, maybe Schadenfreude, out of seeing how great wealth can often fracture a family. All families are different, rich or poor, and not all rich families are dysfunctional, but rich dysfunctional ones are catnip for writers, from F. Tolstoy was half-right when he said, at the beginning of Anna Karenina, that all happy families are alike and every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
Brothers and sisters are all at each other’s throats, all competing for the good graces of their father, who’s strongly reminiscent of Rupert Murdoch.
“If you’re missing the Roys of Succession,” a recent review said of my latest novel, “you can get your fix from the Kimballs of House on Fire.” The addictive HBO series, about a super-rich family that owns a giant media corporation sort of like Fox News, premiered when I was finishing up House on Fire, in which my series hero, the private spy Nick Heller, infiltrates a wealthy and very screwed up billionaire family whose pharmaceutical fortune comes from opioids.