The telltale sign that you are at the wedding of a rich person is the napkins. At the not-rich person’s wedding, should a waiter spill water or wine or a mixed drink of well liquor onto the napkin-covered lap of a guest, the beverage would bead up and roll off the cheap square of commercially laundered polyblend fabric, down the guest’s legs, eventually pooling on the hideous, overly busy patterned carpet designed and chosen specifically to mask these such stains.
These are the opening lines of the novel; roughly a fourth of the entire opening paragraph. And the next three-fourths continue to dive into even greater detail about rich people’s weddings, carpeting, servants and wine spills or the lack thereof. If one is a reader who likes to judge a book by the opening page and, furthermore, one is a reader who does not really care for books that go on and on about the “problems” faced by rich people, that reader would probably stop at about this point and toss the book. What remains to be seen, however, is whether the book is really about the “problems” of rich people are whether it is about the problems of normal people whose income is dependent upon rich people thinking they have actual problems. Hint: keep reading if you are one of those types of readers because not everything about a book can be gleaned from the opening page.
Olga sighed. This topic always made her irritable and defensive. When her mother was first gone, young Olga was despondent for months. One day she overheard two teachers talking about her at school. Poor Olga. How sad. Her father a junkie. Her mother ran off. Poor little girl. The pity dripping from their voices. Being the subject of such sentiment disgusted her, made her feel small. She vowed to fix her face, to don a mask impenetrable to ruth.
First off: that final word is almost certainly intended to be truth and not ruth and is simply a case of a first edition typo that will be corrected in future editions, but that is exactly how it appears in the printing of the book and nobody should exercise the freedom to make assumptions and make an editorial alteration to any word printed in the novel unless it has been approved by the author beforehand.
Now, with that being said and out of the way, this quote offers insight into the mindset of the title character based on two extremely important facts about her childhood. Olga is the wedding planner whose problems stem from knowing what rich people consider to be “problems” and if her father was a junkie and her mother abandoned her as a child, one is likely to assume she is likely not one of those people born into the privilege of considering the pattern of a rug they don’t own to be one of life’s most angsty objects. On the other hand, lots of rich people do abuse drugs and marital discord is one of the few things that rich and poor people know equally well, so who’s to say without reading further to penetrate to the ruth of things.
Every single thing she had done with her life she had figured out for herself. Going to an Ivy League college. Every internship. Her first job. Her second job Reggie King had helped her get, but how many other bitches did Reggie meet and then never talk to again? Her business was all her, too. She designed the logo.
See what can happen when you dare read further? As it turns out, that first impression about the economic circumstances of the title character seems to be a pretty good gut instinct. She is certainly not the socialite wedding planner whose main job is being the name on the business card while hiring others to do literally everything else. She really is the daughter of a junkie from a busted marriage who decided she wasn’t going to let excuses keep her down. On the other hand, of course, things are never quite as simple as they seem. For instance, what’s that bit there in the middle about Reggie King? Either Olga figured out “every single thing” for herself or she didn’t; there is no middle option with such assertions of the absolute. And there is also the case of Olga’s brother, the highly popular telegenic Congressman.
The present day in this narrative that contains a good many flashbacks is 2017 which goes all the way back to when one had to do a lot more than simply be the most outrageous clown piling out of the tiny car in order to get elected to the House of Representatives. Generally speaking, that was back when you had to have connections with rich people of the type that could usually only be established if you yourself were, as they say, comfortable. The opening lines of this novel set the stage for some difficult questions about where economic lines are drawn in America and how those economic lines translate into what are perceived as problems as opposed to “problems” for people.
