Can a family come together—and hold it together—when all of its members seem to be in freefall at once? That’s the central question animating Suzy Vitello’s wacky, wise, and fast-paced new novel, Griftopia.
Set in Trumpian times, when everyone has a scheme and a scam and it’s hard for average folks to pay the bills, Griftopia offers a multi-generational look at what happens when chaos and desperation strike everywhere at the same time.
There’s middle-aged Pearl Freischin, who, as the book opens, is flying to Salt Lake City to pick up her sister, Scarlett, whose husband has been arrested for embezzlement. The plan is to simply drive Scarlett’s U-Haul to Pearl’s home in Portland, Oregon. But Pearl consumes too many gummies on the flight and Scarlett absconds with valuable paintings she no longer owns, and the bad decisions, toxic secrets, and dismaying news pile up after that.
There’s Helena, Scarlett’s daughter, a one-time tennis prodigy who rode her six-year-old daughter Burkleigh’s golden pipes to internet fortune, until the girl’s renditions of Billie Holiday tunes led to her cancellation for cultural appropriation. Now Helena needs a job and a place to live or another avenue to easy cash.
And there’s Declan, Pearl’s son, a running phenom with touchy bowels and a regimented life, who meets a townie named George at a bikini drive-thru and trades his pre-med studies for his new girlfriend’s sketchy online hustles.
Trailing a coterie of questionable characters behind them, these three tentpole figures converge on Pearl’s once-quiet home, where an outbreak of unexpected alliances, feuds, and grifts threatens to destroy their family.
Griftopia is a headlong rush of dizzying events and challenging situations Vitello somehow manages to keep straight in the reader’s mind. This isn’t a novel weighed down by pondering or heavy characterization. But it raises questions, nonetheless—about the heedless pursuit of a fast buck that seems to mark our times, the precarious lives of those without high-paying jobs or trust funds, and the origins of a family’s habits and insecurities.
For the Freischin clan, the ur-event seems to be the deaths, in a skiing accident, of Pearl and Scarlett’s parents when they were children. Sent first to live with grandparents in Austria, the girls wound up living in different American households: Scarlett with their other, strict-Christian grandparents and Pearl with a friend of their mother who smoked dope, hooked up with men, and treated her charge like a buddy rather than a child she was responsible for.
One especially intriguing element is the book’s depiction of the online world as the site of dubious “opportunities” to cash in on whatever is hot or available, from the “tradwife” phenomenon to a child’s perfect pitch. One disturbing element is how easily its characters lose sight of Burkleigh’s innocence as they jostle to take advantage of the internet’s lust for children with talent.
Vitello’s writing is endlessly entertaining, with occasional asides dropped into otherwise propulsive sentences and accumulations of details that give you a quick, deft picture. Here, for example, is her description of ratcheting tension during one short passage of time:
The whole month had been like this. First, her central air conditioning unit went tits up during June’s heat-dome event. Then a sweet gum limb fell on her roof, creating a crack big enough for an infestation of squirrels and their accompanying feces in the crawl space where she stored holiday decorations. Scarlett had caused a minor kitchen fire, forgetting the soup she’d left on the stove while watching one of her Housewives shows on her laptop. If it weren’t for Burkleigh sneaking into the kitchen for potato chips, the whole damn place would have burned up. Which, actually, would have been fine with Pearl at this point; everything gone to shit.
Of course, the parade of schemes, secrets, and confrontations reaches a fever pitch as the novel speeds dyspeptically toward its concluding pages. It’s a Disney ride through these turbulent, baffling, cynical, and occasionally clarifying times. And I loved it.
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As an author, editor, and long-time resident of Portland, Oregon, Suzy Vitello’s fixation on families in emotional peril has kept her busy for decades. She holds an MFA from Antioch, Los Angeles, and has been the recipient of an Oregon Literary Arts Grant. Her previous novels include The Bequest, Bitterroot, Faultland, The Moment Before, and the YA Empress Chronicles series.
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Griftopia comes out today (May 5).
At 7 p.m. on Tuesday, May 12, I’ll be interviewing Vitello about her new novel at Third Place Books in Seattle’s Ravenna district (6504 20th Avenue NE). Join us for this free and fun event.
Vitello will also appear in conversation with author Monica Drake at Powell’s Books in Portland at 7 p.m. on Tuesday, May 26.