Please note: What follows is the first two paragraphs of a review I wrote of Regina Porter's new novel The Rich People Have Gone Away for the Chicago Review of Books. Because, as always, I want CHIRB to get all the clicks they deserve for being nice enough to let me publish with them, please click on this link to read the full review (don't worry, it's free, there's no paywall or anything).
Regina Porter’s new novel, The Rich People Have Gone Away, joins a cadre of terrific Covid-19-pandemic focused novels published this summer. Like Porochista Khakpour’s Tehrangeles, Teddy Wayne’s The Winner, and Hari Kunzru’s Blue Ruin, Porter’s novel delves specifically into how the early days of the pandemic lockdown affected people of different privilege in vastly different ways. There are many definitions of privilege, but we all learned a new one then: privilege is the opportunity to improve your chances of surviving a deadly virus.
Porter leaves little doubt about how we should frame the discussion in our minds before we open the novel: it’s right there in the title! When you’re rich (and in many cases, white), you have the luxury of simply running away from problems, as many New Yorkers did in March and April 2020.