The Altruists: A Novel

by Andrew Ridker Narrated by Mark Bramhall

Overview

A New York Times Editors' Choice

"[An] intelligent, funny, and remarkably assured first novel. . . . [Andrew Ridker establishes] himself as a big, promising talent. . . . Hilarious. . . . Astute and highly entertaining. . . . Outstanding."
--The New York Times Book Review

"With humor and warmth, Ridker explores the meaning of family and its inevitable baggage. . . . A relatable, unforgettable view of regular people making mistakes and somehow finding their way back to each other."
--People (Book of the Week)

"[A] strikingly assured debut. . . . A novel that grows more complex and more uproarious by the page, culminating in an unforgettable climax."
--Entertainment Weekly (The Must List)

A Real Simple Best Book of the Year (So Far)

Named a Most Anticipated Book of 2019 by The Millions and PureWow

A vibrant and perceptive novel about a father's plot to win back his children's inheritance

Arthur Alter is in trouble. A middling professor at a Midwestern college, he can't afford his mortgage, he's exasperated his much-younger girlfriend, and his kids won't speak to him. And then there's the money--the small fortune his late wife, Francine, kept secret, which she bequeathed directly to his children.

Those children are Ethan, an anxious recluse living off his mother's money on a choice plot of Brooklyn real estate, and Maggie, a would-be do-gooder trying to fashion herself a noble life of self-imposed poverty. On the verge of losing the family home, Arthur invites his children back to St. Louis under the guise of a reconciliation. But in doing so, he unwittingly unleashes a Pandora's box of age-old resentments and long-buried memories--memories that orbit Francine, the matriarch whose life may hold the key to keeping them together.

Spanning New York, Paris, Boston, St. Louis, and a small desert outpost in Zimbabwe, The Altruists is a darkly funny (and ultimately tender) family saga that confronts the divide between baby boomers and their millennial offspring. It's a novel about money, privilege, politics, campus culture, dating, talk therapy, rural sanitation, infidelity, kink, the American beer industry, and what it means to be a "good person."

Editorial Reviews

APRIL 2019 - AudioFile

Mark Bramhall’s narration captures Arthur Alter’s evolution from total self-involvement to something better. This novel is dark, humorous, compelling, and all about family. Alter is a mostly failed academic with two semi-dysfunctional adult children who are mourning their mother, Francine, and resenting the affair their father carried out while Francine was on her deathbed. Ridker creates something warm and hopeful out of those dark ingredients. Bramhall is a fine narrator, although the listener may wish at times that he would speed it up a little. He handles men’s and women’s voices equally well. While the story's themes are not sparklingly new, Ridker’s fine writing and Bramhall’s strong performance keep them sounding fresh. G.S. © AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine

Publishers Weekly

01/07/2019

Ridker’s smashing debut follows the travails of the middle-class Jewish Alter family in their quest to discover how to be moral. Arthur relocated the family from Boston to St. Louis with the goal (never realized) of becoming a tenured professor at Danforth, and it’s his wife, Francine’s, success as a therapist that has allowed them to live in a wealthy enclave. Their son Ethan is now a 31-year-old gay man who still thinks about his college boyfriend while living as a shut-in in his New York apartment, piling up debt. Ethan’s sister Maggie, a recent college graduate, also lives in New York, and seeks to bring goodness everywhere and repeatedly accepts low-paying jobs. Arthur has always been a remote figure to Ethan and Maggie, which only intensifies as they discover the affair he had while Francine was being treated for breast cancer. Two years after Francine’s death, Arthur invites his children home for a visit, supposedly to make amends, but it’s really because he’s broke—and Francine’s money went to them. While Arthur awkwardly tries to relate to Ethan and Maggie, they begin to see him more as a whole person instead of a construct. Ridker tells his tale with humor, insight, and depth, making this a novel that will resonate with readers. (Mar.)

From the Publisher

[An] intelligent, funny, and remarkably assured first novel. . . . [Andrew Ridker establishes] himself as a big, promising talent. . . . Hilarious. . . . [Ridker] writes sentences with the lively, poetic zing of one as attuned to the sounds of words as to their meanings. . . . Astute and highly entertaining. . . . Ridker’s ambitious blend of global perspective and intimate human comedy seems likely to evoke comparisons to the work of Jonathan Franzen and Nathan Hill. . . . The warm ending opens up the possibility of a bright future . . . which is precisely what this outstanding debut suggests for its talented author.”
—Stephen McCauley, The New York Times Book Review

"With humor and warmth, Ridker explores the meaning of family and its inevitable baggage. The Altruists may not paint the prettiest picture, but it's a relatable, unforgettable view of regular people making mistakes and somehow finding their way back to each other." 
—People (Book of the Week)

"Tragedy begets comedy in Ridker's strikingly assured debut about a family undone by grief. Ridker spins delicate moral dilemmas in a novel that grows more complex and more uproarious by the page, culminating in an unforgettable climax."
—Entertainment Weekly (The Must List)

“A satisfyingly sprawling family epic. . . . The characters are so true to life that it’s almost incidental that, without becoming preachy or navel-gazing, the book also raises interesting questions about morality and goodness.”
—Keziah Weir, Vanity Fair

“In this début novel, two millennial New Yorkers, Ethan and Maggie, return home to St. Louis to reconnect with their irascible father, Arthur. . . . An incisive inquiry into the point at which self-interest ends and compassion begins.”
—The New Yorker

“Andrew Ridker, still in his twenties, has uncorked a lively, tragicomic debut novel. . . . Ridker elevates his book with a sharp eye for the absurdities of contemporary American culture. . . . [A] skillful balancing act between sympathy and satire is on full, fabulous display. . . . The Altruists boasts numerous charms, ranging from worthy ethical issues treated with an effective wryness to its rare, fond celebration of steamy St. Louis. Its ending is well-earned, and so are its life lessons, adding up to an unusually promising debut.”
—Heller McAlpin, NPR.org

“A witty look at baby boomers and millennials and the things money can’t buy.”
—Real Simple

"A widowed father and his adult children find their way after years of getting on one another's nerves. With prickly, strangely endearing characters and sharp writing, this novel is tender and hilarious. "
—Good Housekeeping 

“The Altruists [is] alive to the contradictions between morality and comfort that exist everywhere under global structures of capitalism and politics.” 
—Katy Waldman, NewYorker.com

"An ambitious family drama. . . . The Altruists has a sense of humor. Mr. Ridker has a gift for comic asides. . . . The fun is in the dysfunction."
—Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal 

“Ridker writes with such good humor and graceful irony that he manages to portray Arthur and his kids as people you want to care about, even if you wouldn’t invite them to your house. . . . Ridker’s genius is making a generally unlikable character fun to read and gossip about. Quite an accomplishment in a first novel.”
—St. Louis Post-Dispatch

“Wise, witty. . . . Ridker is preternaturally smart about the traps that even bright people set for themselves, he loves his all of his messed-up characters and he finds hopeful-but-not-unrealistic ways for them to live their better, if not best, lives.”
—Minneapolis Star Tribune

"[A] winning family saga."
—Southern Living

"Engross­ing and engag­ing. . . . The result of Andrew Ridker’s fam­i­ly cross-sec­tion is tru­ly splen­did. It is a fun and enter­tain­ing explo­ration of love and kind­ness, and how gen­eros­i­ty, even pre­sent­ed in its finest hour, is not spared its own, very unique and untidy flaws."
—Wendy Ruth Walker, Jewish Book Council

"Ridker psychoanalytically peels back layers of time to reveal the truth and, in doing so, crafts wholly complex, three-dimensional characters we come to love. As we root for them, Ridker brings up larger questions about what it means to live a good life, both for others and for ourselves."
—Camille Jacobson, The Paris Review Daily (Staff Pick)

 “A witty family saga that confronts the divide between baby boomers and their millennial offspring. This relatable tragicomedy riffs on capitalism and culture with verve.”
—Bookriot

"Ridker . . . says the major theme he wanted to explore was what it means to be a good person, where values come from in terms of inheritance and in terms of what we choose for ourselves as adults. That he does it so well and with such humor his first time out means the author has chosen well for himself."
—St. Louis Magazine

“[The Altruists’s] ability to capture some of the difficulties faced by people in [their] twenties and thirties in contemporary America is striking and powerful.”
—Rabbi Michael Lerner, Tikkun

Fascinating and deeply compelling . . . wildly funny and deeply empathic. Ridker has an incredible penchant for setting each scene in full and populating it with characters that brim with clear-cut emotional depth and realism. And while the author possesses a unique talent for metaphors and similes, he can also deliver gut-busting images around any corner. . . . We can expect many more great works of fiction from this extremely talented young novelist. . . . Required reading for these divisive times.”
—Fiction Writers Review

"Tender and intimate. . . . Stunningly intricate and touching. . . . [A] call for universal generosity in a time of change, grief, and nationwide emotional tension."
—The Daily Mississippian

“Ingenious. . . . Funny as hell. . . . The book belongs to the tradition of trenchant atomizations of the modern American family—the territory of Jonathan Franzen . . . and Ridker is just as good. . . . A brilliant, pitiless, and hilarious dissection of an American family in crisis.”
—Shelf Awareness for Readers

“A whip-smart, wickedly funny and psychologically acute novel about the cost of doing good. It manages to satirise its characters’ folly and egotism, while keeping us wholly on their side. The finale—a car crash of a family reunion—hits the sweet spot between hilarity and pathos. . . . There’s something to impress on every page.”
—The Daily Mail (UK)

“[The Altruists’s] wickedly dark sense of humor combines with a complex plot to create a compelling debut.”
—Zyzzyva

“Reading Andrew Ridker's debut novel, you soon realize you're in the presence of a new talent. In The Altruists he has conjured up the sort of dysfunctional family situation ideal for bitter humour. . . . The Altruists is intricately plotted to drip-feed us revelations. . . . Ridker writes in crisp, sometimes side-splitting prose.”
—Ben Cooke, The Times (UK)

"Ridker meticulously peels away the scabs that have grown over the wounds of the surviving Alters, laying bare, with compassion and piercing wit, the long-simmering antagonisms that haunt both father and children. At the same time, he gently hints at a way forward for this decidedly imperfect, but oddly appealing, family. A painfully honest, but tender, examination of how love goes awry in the places it should flourish."
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“The hype around The Altruists and Ridker, an Iowa Writer’s Workshop alum, is warranted. . . . [A] darkly funny, heartfelt tale. . . . The lesson Arthur and his children learn by the novel’s end is not financial in nature but moral. It proves to be priceless.”
—BookPage

"[A] smashing debut. . . . Ridker tells his tale with humor, insight, and depth, making this a novel that will resonate with readers."
—Publishers Weekly

"Beautifully written, with witty, pitch-perfect dialogue and fascinating characters, Ridker's impressive, deeply satisfying debut is an extraordinarily insightful look at a family broken apart by loss and struggling to find a way back to each other and themselves."
—Booklist

“The somewhat dysfunctional Alter family is tenderly dissected in this debut . . . [A] smart novel with an impressive balance between satire and heart.”
—The Sunday Times (UK)

"Ridker's debut is at once humorous and poignant."
—Library Journal

"Sparkling. . . . Brilliant prose adorns this gem of a novel, making it a delight to read."
—Little Village

"A comedy of errors. . . . Funny. . . . Very satisfying."
—Rabbi Rachel Esserman, The Reporter

“A spry comedy of parental failure and romantic misadventure. . . . This is a smart, knowing, tender first novel, full of immaculate comic timing and loquacious chutzpah.”
—The Spectator (UK)

“This tragicomedy wittily explores old wounds, new grievances and hard-won wisdom.”
—Sunday Express (UK)

“Ridker handles the tussle between parent and children with humour and psychological insight, and the novel deals fluently with the perennial intergenerational struggle for understanding. . . . [Ridker] is a sure comic talent, witty and engaged, and alive to the legion of competing and irreconcilable roles from which the individual today must self-consciously choose.”
—Literary Review (UK)

“The Altruists balances a fine line between dark humour and poignancy.”
—Good Housekeeping (UK)

"Andrew Ridker has a lot to say about the way we live now. The result is one of those super-brilliant, super-funny novels one enjoys in the manner of a squirrel with an especially delicious acorn. I found myself trying to get out of every activity and responsibility just to come back to this novel."
—Gary Shteyngart, author of Super Sad True Love Story

"It's frankly a little unfair that a writer so young should be this talented. Not only does Andrew Ridker have a sharp eye for the absurdities and contradictions of 21st century America, but he also delivers a heartfelt and compassionate story about a family shattered by loss, now finding their awkward way back to each other. I cared so much for these people, their traumas and betrayals, their public humiliations and private failures. The Altruists is a truly remarkable debut."
—Nathan Hill, author of The Nix

"Andrew Ridker's expansive, big-hearted debut novel The Altruists is a hilarious and moving portrait of family, and a page-turning investigation of the blurry lines between right, wrong, and selfish."
—Julie Buntin, author of Marlena

“This book will inspire readers to sacrifice comfort and find meaning—Turn off (the comfort), Tune out (the babble of groupthink), Drop in (to duty and responsibility)—or else! Thank you to Andrew Ridker for this excellent debut novel. It is culturally significant and a sign of the times.”
—Atticus Lish, author of Preparation for the Next Life

"The Altruists is a superb exploration of isolation, loneliness, and infidelity—in the broadest, most interesting application of the word. Every chapter is crafted with the care of a perfect short story, and the characters within it are so fully formed I could almost feel their breathing. How tremendous (and a little annoying) that a novel this striking could come from a writer so young."
—Kristen Radtke, author of Imagine Wanting Only This

"The Altruists is as rich and generous as the title suggests—a boisterous, funny, real-damn-smart novel about the agonies of family secrets and guilt. Andrew Ridker has got it all—magnetic style, oceans of intellect, and true affection for his hilariously neurotic characters. This book will have you doubled over and crying every sort of tear."
—Tony Tulathimutte, author of Private Citizens

APRIL 2019 - AudioFile

Mark Bramhall’s narration captures Arthur Alter’s evolution from total self-involvement to something better. This novel is dark, humorous, compelling, and all about family. Alter is a mostly failed academic with two semi-dysfunctional adult children who are mourning their mother, Francine, and resenting the affair their father carried out while Francine was on her deathbed. Ridker creates something warm and hopeful out of those dark ingredients. Bramhall is a fine narrator, although the listener may wish at times that he would speed it up a little. He handles men’s and women’s voices equally well. While the story's themes are not sparklingly new, Ridker’s fine writing and Bramhall’s strong performance keep them sounding fresh. G.S. © AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine

Kirkus Reviews

★ 2018-12-11

A Midwestern family struggles to rewrite its flawed history.

The proverbial road paved with good intentions runs through the quintessentially Middle American city of St. Louis in this acute debut novel. After nearly 20 years on the faculty of wealthy private Danforth University, Arthur Alter remains a disgruntled non-tenure track engineering professor. Two years a widower, at age 65 he's entangled in a joyless relationship with a colleague, a German history professor young enough to be his daughter. His children, introverted Ethan and generous Maggie, still mourn the passing of their mother, Francine, a family and couples therapist, while they find themselves adrift in their own lives. Ethan's deep in debt in Brooklyn after having left his consulting job, and Maggie works at an assortment of undemanding odd jobs for her Queens neighbors. With his wife's income gone and his teaching load slashed, Arthur, notorious for his miserliness, now faces the prospect of losing his heavily mortgaged home in an upscale suburb. His financial bailout scheme involves inviting his children home for a long weekend and inveigling them to part with a portion of their inheritance from Francine, a generous bequest she bestowed on them while intentionally bypassing Arthur. The younger Alters' return goes anything but the way Arthur plans or the children expect. But amid the tragicomic misadventures that befall each of the family members during that visit, Ridker reveals how the roots of Arthur's tightfistedness lie in a well-intentioned, three decades-old effort to apply his engineering skills to solving the sanitation problems of rural Zimbabwe. Ridker meticulously peels away the scabs that have grown over the wounds of the surviving Alters, laying bare, with compassion and piercing wit, the long-simmering antagonisms that haunt both father and children. At the same time, he gently hints at a way forward for this decidedly imperfect, but oddly appealing, family.

A painfully honest, but tender, examination of how love goes awry in the places it should flourish.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940171793180
Publisher:	Penguin Random House
Publication date:	03/05/2019
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

One

"You're coming with us."

Maggie had known Emma since braces, but the awkward girl who'd played saxophone in their high school jazz band with enough enthusiasm to redeem the instrument-and, for that matter, jazz-was now in her second year of law school. A dozen of her classmates stood clustered in Emma's living room, hands hooked around significant others or planted confidently on their hips. In the kitchenette, handles of vodka with frosted-glass insignia shared counter space with plastic jugs of Simply Orange. Maggie swore she knew the song piping through the apartment, but each time she came close to identifying it, an incoming text would ping through the phone that was hooked to the speakers and throw her concentration. "You always show up at the start of things," Emma continued, "but then you sneak away like no one's going to notice."

"No I don't," said Maggie.

"Well, good. Because you're coming out with us tonight."

Maggie ground her teeth and stared at the orange ring of residue at the bottom of her Solo cup. Across the room, a toothy boy in fashionable glasses was doing an impression of someone Maggie didn't recognize.

"There are a lot of interesting people here," Emma added, gesturing to a huddle of her classmates.

Maggie scowled. The whole scene felt staged. Everyone was too put together, too self-assured. A jolt of paranoia seized her. Had this party, this Lower East Side gathering of marketing associates and financial analysts and almost-lawyers, been arranged for her benefit? Maggie couldn't shake the feeling that this conspicuous display of upward mobility was intended to send her a message.

"What are you trying to say?"

Emma put her hands up. "I'm not trying to say anything!"

Maggie relaxed her shoulders. She was doing fine, after all. She made rent working for the good people of Queens. Her only boss was her conscience. Most days this meant running errands, or babysitting, or liaising with city government on behalf of her Spanish- and Russian- and Chinese-speaking neighbors. Odd jobs. Over the course of five months she'd cultivated a small network of clients, mostly immigrants who considered her US citizenship to be a marketable skill. It was satisfying work, though it didn't pay particularly well. She was always a little bit hungry.

The toothy boy sidled up to them. "We were talking about Ziegler," he said.

"Oh my god," said Emma. "Ziegler!"

"Who's Ziegler?" Maggie asked.

"He's one of our professors," said the boy. "Torts."

"What are torts?"

"It's when an injured party-"

"Oh. Never mind."

The boy looked hurt. "Okay," he said.

Emma introduced them. "This is Maggie. We went to high school together."

"What do you do?" the boy asked, squinting.

Recently, a Polish woman on Himrod Street hired Maggie to talk at her newborn son. She was told she could say anything she liked, as long as she said it in English, the idea being that the baby would assimilate the language into its burgeoning subconscious and grow up fluent. But on her first day, once the mother left the room, Maggie blanked. She muttered erm and um and uh the whole session, paralyzed at first by nerves and then by guilt at the prospect of making ten bucks an hour without having earned it. "I can't take your money," she told the woman at the session's end. "But I'll be back next week with a lot to say. I promise."

Okay, so the hunger wasn't dire, but to be honest? Denying oneself a full belly kind of felt a little bit saintly. Maggie kept enough money on hand to afford to feel saintly, to afford to turn other money down. She regulated her spending with scrupulous discipline, consuming only what she needed, only what she felt she deserved. The problem was that her body couldn't differentiate between self-inflicted hunger and the other kind. It, a body, knew only "hunger"-the nutritional deficiency, not the ideological assertion-and, accordingly, she'd slimmed. Six pounds over two years. Which wasn't nothing, especially when you weren't much to begin with.

It was nice at first, feeling light and wobbly all the time. She walked the streets of Ridgewood with a mild buzz that blurred the boundaries of her consciousness. But then her cramps grew claws and the hunger pangs turned violent. She became concerned after passing out in a five-flavor cloud behind the Hong Kong Super Buffet, her legs buckling in mutiny against her. In the first semester of her freshman year at Danforth University in St. Louis, Maggie took two weeks of Philosophy 101: Foundations of Western Thought before dropping it for something less theoretical, which was long enough for her to learn the phrase mind-body problem but not its definition. Now, she felt she was experiencing, if not the mind-body problem, then at least a mind-body problem. Her body was making its own demands, while the part of her that made her Maggie-she supposed this was the "self"-seemed to hover above it like a tethered balloon.

Emma waved a hand in front of her. "Maggie? Brian asked you something."

Weight aside, Maggie was a credible likeness of her late mother. She had Francine Klein Alter's hair, reddish brown and prone to curl, and a subtle spritz of freckles across the bridge of her nose. But where Maggie was small, her mother had been (not big, or stocky, but) solid, with a density that bespoke firm moral conviction. From her father, to whom Maggie refused to acknowledge a resemblance, she'd inherited a partially protruding forehead, a skull hammered into shape by a mind that couldn't make itself up.

"Is she okay?" the boy, Brian, asked.

"We need to put some food in you," said Emma. "I think I have tortilla chips around here somewhere."

"No, no." Maggie waved her off. "I'm fine."

"Are you sure?"

She nodded. A little light-headedness was all. "Positive."

"Okay. Well-all right. Get your stuff together. We're leaving in ten minutes."

"Where are we going?"

"Out."

Maggie scanned the room. Every few minutes someone would excuse themselves from their cluster and join another, which invariably caused someone in that cluster to depart in short order for yet another, the groups always shifting but remaining the same size in some kind of social thermodynamics that struck Maggie as both deliberate and alienating. "That's the problem," she said. "Everybody here is on their way somewhere else."

"What are you talking about? We're going to a bar. All of us."

Maggie raised her eyebrows. "Don't lump me with this 'us.'"

Emma sighed. "Everyone here is super nice. And smart!" She poked Brian with her elbow. "Brian is a genius."

Maggie shook her head. "I can't."

"Mags. It's my birthday." She smiled desperately. "You've known me longer than anyone here. Can you please? This once? For me?"

Maggie was flattered-did she really know Emma the longest, and therefore best?-but she could already see how the evening would play out. She'd buy one sixteen-dollar cocktail and spend the rest of the night regretting the expense, enduring conversations about how 1L had been much harder than 2L while refusing drinks from boys with disposable incomes who all wore the same blue button-down shirts.

"Sorry," she said. "I can't do it."

Emma's smile slanted. "You can, but you won't. You don't have to make things so difficult on yourself, you know. Life doesn't have to be that hard."

But Emma had it wrong. Life was hard, for almost everyone, and it was the duty of those for whom life was easy to impose difficulty on themselves before they rotted from the inside out. If there was one thing Maggie couldn't stand to see, it was people with plenty to lose enjoying themselves.

All at once she felt dizzy. Sick. The music in the room began to slur. Was anyone else hearing this? A drop of sweat landed in her cup. She extended a hand and reached for Emma's shoulder, but her fingers never made it all the way.

Though she knew she shouldn't have skipped lunch, Maggie blamed her fainting spell on the wear and tear she suffered at the hands of a twelve-year-old boy.

Twice per week, she visited Bruno Nakahara at his parents' apartment, ostensibly to help him and his brother with their homework. But Bruno's newfound interest in mixed martial arts had resulted in a constellation of bruises spread across her body, hard-won blemishes the color of stale steak. He maintained that pummeling his tutor was a necessary exercise in service of his craft.

"Ground and pound!" he'd shouted earlier that day, knocking Maggie to the floor.

Though this particular job hardly paid, Maggie tolerated, even welcomed, Bruno's abuse. His assaults were evidence that she was engaged in the kind of work that required sacrifice. Think Mother Teresa, frail and stooped. Gandhi and his jutting ribcage. Maggie's were legitimizing bruises. Proof of character. Because that was the thing about trying to do good: you always wound up knuckled in the gut.

The Nakaharas lived in cramped, if cozy, quarters. The apartment overlooked the awkward heart of Cypress, Myrtle, and Madison in Ridgewood, Queens, a pavilion of negative space where you could hear, on quiet Sunday nights, components of the neighborhood in isolation: church bells logging hours, the zip of flickering neon signage. The thirty-year-old feud between a bald man and a pigeon.

"Oh-kay," she'd grumbled, worming out from under him. She limped inside the apartment. "I see we're still working on our anger issues." She used the first-person plural with the boys. It helped establish unity and trust.

The Nakahara living room invariably stunk of burnt taquitos or pizza rolls or whatever frozen thing Bruno was eating that week, cut with the farts of their infirm yellow Lab, Flower, who had long since planted himself in the corner of the living room to die. The wall-to-wall carpeting was dirtied beige like street-side snow. Above a brown pleather couch, a pair of portraits hung side by side: one of Michael Jackson, the other (she had asked) of Petro Poroshenko.

"I don't have anger issues," Bruno said. "I have ODD." He meant oppositional defiant disorder, an affliction he'd read about on the internet.

"It's a real disease," he said, "and you know that." But the accuracy of his diagnosis did not mitigate its effects.

"Disorder," she corrected. "Not disease."

In the six months that she'd worked with him, Maggie had watched Bruno exhaust a variety of interests, including but not limited to switchblades, extreme eating, and pyromania. Though MMA was, as far as Maggie could tell, little more than an excuse for deranged boxers to dispense with the philosophical elements that supposedly made pugilism a "gentleman's sport," she maintained it was a better hobby than the others. It was athletic, after all, and there was tangible proof of its impact. The fruits of Bruno's labors were evident on his body-and extended now to hers.

"I'm already done with homework," called Alex from the kitchen table, his voice twinkling like a concierge's bell. Where Bruno was all chunk, his limbs puffed out and cinched at the joints like those of balloon animals, his brother was small and sleek, streamlined, with clear skin and ink-black hair.

"If you're finished, you can do your MathBlast. And, Bruno, please remove whatever's smoking in the oven right now."

She unbuckled the belt that latched her messenger bag to her chest, and it fell, with a soft shower of zipper clinks, onto the carpet. Liberated, she began stage-managing the apartment, laying three sharpened pencils by Alex's dominant hand before sliding into Bruno's chair to minimize a knockout game video and open Microsoft Word.

Then, as if on cue, the boy's father, an unkempt Japanese man to whom Maggie had never been formally introduced-and who spoke little English, which was weird, because she didn't think the boys knew Japanese-poked his head into the kitchen. He bestowed a long, concerned look upon the scene and disappeared again into his bedroom.

"Bruno, now."

The boy grunted and headed for the kitchen.

Maggie was a tentative disciplinarian. Beneath her strict rules was a deep well of tenderness for the boys. She didn't enjoy punishing them. She would've preferred they obey her out of sheer respect. She wasn't asking for total reverence. But she maintained that they did respect her. Preteen-boy respect could look a lot like disrespect sometimes. It was how they showed affection. And, she thought, recalling the work of a seminal anthropologist she'd read in college, earning the natives' respect was always step one. Or, not "natives," but-whatever.

"Who wants mini calzone pizzas?" Bruno asked, pulling a tray of blackened dough rolls from the oven. He code-switched to his rap voice. "Just kidding, mothafuckaz. These bitches is mine." He tipped his head back and let one of the saucy pockets fall into his mouth.

Maggie's wayward path to Ridgewood had begun with the idea, conceived of in childhood, that the world was not just small but responsive to her efforts.

As a girl she took frequent walks through Forest Park in St. Louis, collecting errant golf balls that had flown off course. When she'd amassed enough to fill the blue fourteen-gallon recycling bin her parents kept in the garage, she hosed them down and hauled them to the sidewalk by the teeing ground. An entrepreneurial instinct compelled her to erect a sign: golf balls. $1 per. She made forty dollars her first day, selling more than half her stock. But when she showed up the following weekend, Maggie had a change of heart. She decided to give her goods away for free. And why not? She liked taking walks, she liked collecting golf balls-she even liked the purifying act of cleaning them! Although she found golf itself to be a total joke, an uninspired, white-male pastime of the most antiquated kind, she discovered, out there on the green, that she also liked the act of giving.

This was a revelation. If generosity was so euphoric, why did people sell things at all? Why engage in the give-and-take (and take-and-take) of commerce? In the span of two weeks, she had created and destroyed a marketplace. And learned a valuable lesson: the boundaries erected between people and their systems were never as insurmountable as they seemed.

She arrived at this conclusion in spite of a father with a deep reserve of doubt regarding all things philanthropic. A few years after outfoxing capitalism in Forest Park, Maggie expressed an interest in donating her allowance to a hurricane-clobbered New Orleans. But Arthur discouraged her, lecturing his daughter on the dubious fetishism of victimhood and the Red Cross's tendency to squander all its money on overhead.

"They don't do anything with all that cash but sit on it," he said.

Videos