Book review: Confidence by Rafael Frumkin

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A targeted ad slips into your feed. The algorithm knows, because you’ve read an article on the holistic benefits of cordyceps or watched a video about biohacking, that you’ll be interested in this item. It’s a small device, a sleek and photogenic array of magnets and lights and sensors, which can guide you through a process called “synthesis” to unclog your mind of past trauma and set you free into true enlightenment. It’s called the Bliss-Mini.

You’d like to be enlightened. You click the embedded link, and a landing page loads. Welcome, it says, to NuLife. Welcome to the Goop-meets-Theranos-meets-Heavens-Gate sham wellness empire at the heart of “Confidence,” the new novel from Rafael Frumkin.

Like most great capers, “Confidence begins with a scrappy underdog down on his luck. Frumkin’s narrator, the spiky but vulnerable Ezra Green, was born poor; he has terrible eyesight and finds himself at reform camp after one of his schemes for quick money seriously injures a classmate. It’s there that he meets fellow grifter Orson Ortman, the handsome and magnetic Jay Gatsby to his Nick Carraway, rich with contraband weed and easy charm. For Ezra, it’s soul-deep devotion at first sight. We’re not sure what it is for Orson, even after they start sleeping together.

The two run increasingly high-stakes cons to support themselves, until Orson invents something called “synthesis,” a scientifically dubious form of fake hypnosis they can sell to rich people desperate for fulfillment. The Synthesis con becomes a corporation — and a cultish spiritual collective — called NuLife. At NuLife’s peak, Orson reigns over a commune of dedicated disciples while Ezra does the dirty work of steering their billion-dollar company. All this, in the name of taking what they’re owed from the one percent.

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Ezra’s acerbic narration skewers celebrity-led wellness influencing, empty-eyed business tycoons and Silicon Valley scammers with the merciless verve of an episode of “Succession.” Highlights of Frumkin’s dark and cutting humor include an Elon Musk-esque billionaire inventor who magnanimously hands out drones to children begging for money and a tabloid referring to Orson as “L. Ron Hotboy.”

But it’s under this salty, toothsome crust that Frumkin does his most complicated and compelling work: the deconstruction of Ezra’s own morality.

At the novel’s outset, Ezra scrabbles through his world with honest hunger and understandable, if sometimes pedantic, disdain for those with more than him.

He’s a millennial Robin Hood, pausing occasionally to wonder if he’s gone too far. In this economy, we want to root for the guy taking rich idiots for a ride. Ezra is us in our late-on-rent fantasies. He steals what he needs — deserves — from a class of people who won’t even miss it, and if he momentarily forgets their humanity, it must have been an accident.

But as the human costs of his schemes add up, we begin to see what Ezra can’t (literally, as his vision deteriorates). We think we know an underdog story when we see one, and by definition, we hold the underdog as morally good. “Confidence” challenges us to ask: What if our protagonist isn’t a good person? What if we know this, but Ezra doesn’t? And what happens when an unreliable moral compass enters the magnetic field of a narcissist like Orson?

Orson is a genius, a visionary, a magician, a god with a golden touch. Even if he had never ascended from con man to cult leader, he would still be all of these things to Ezra, as a withholding narcissist assumes superhuman hugeness in the eyes of the person who loves them.

In Ezra’s narrowing vision, there’s room for nothing but Orson and his diminishing emotional returns. No room to notice that he only ever praises Ezra for his utility in their cons, or that Ezra’s assignments for NuLife keep him far from Orson and close to incrimination, or that his dream of finally getting Orson’s attention long enough to marry him was never going to happen.

When Ezra wonders at last if he could have possibly been Orson’s first mark, it’s a poetic stab to the heart. How pitiful, how tragic, how morbidly romantic, that Ezra should be Orson’s greatest con, and the last to know.

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“Confidence” asks the reader to weigh passion against greed, genius against narcissism, love against addiction. Yes, Frumkin accomplishes this by holding an unflattering mirror to bloviating billionaires, scam start-ups, and the wellness industrial complex, but he also does it by digging into our confidence in our own morality. How easy would it be to lose, under the right circumstances? Would we notice if we did? Or would we wind up like Ezra: too convinced he’s still the good guy, doing bad things for good reasons, to see the truth?

As a crime novel, “Confidence” is a propulsive, cheeky, eat-the-rich page-turner to satisfy the craving for a well-crafted caper. As a criminal, Ezra Green learns the hard way that, once the staff has cleared the gilded china, you are what you eat.

Casey McQuiston is author of the novels “Red, White & Royal Blue,” “One Last Stop” and “I Kissed Shara Wheeler.”

Simon & Schuster. 320 pp. $27.99

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