THE GREATEST POSSIBLE GOOD

When their patriarch donates the family fortune to charity, an already unhappy family is thoroughly atomized.

It doesn’t always work to write a novel driven by moral purpose. With so much enlightenment to deliver, how much fun can it be? In the case of Brooks’ debut, there’s nothing to worry about. Even the particulars of the grand gesture that sets the plot in motion reveal the book’s wry aesthetic. As the novel opens, Arthur and Yara Candlewick are confronting their son, Emil, about a little something that came in the mail—LSD and MDMA the 15-year-old purchased on the dark web. That evening, Arthur leaves their house in the Cotswolds for a walk, taking with him “his daughter’s book, his son’s drug stash, and an uncorked bottle of mid-price Bordeaux.” The book in question is an explainer on effective altruism, one which radical-minded 17-year-old Evangeline was reading at the dinner table “with the urgency of an actress searching for her own name in a bad review.” Arthur himself will read it at the bottom of a mineshaft into which he has fallen, under the influence of a mind-expanding drug cocktail. After he’s rescued, he’s a different man, determined to give away all the proceeds of the impending sale of his company and to live a life of monastic simplicity. None of the other members of the family will follow him on this path; even Evangeline finds herself annoyed and alienated by the fact that the focal point of her rebellion has “cheated and become exactly the kind of person she wanted to be, overnight, and with no effort whatsoever.” Brooks makes each of these flawed characters endearing by showing not just their pettiness and limitations but what is in their hearts. “As a teenager, Yara had always imagined that her family, when she had one, would be an inseparable band of bantering adventurers, going forth into the world together, on road trips and holidays and outings to restored castles or spangly caves. She had never expected that they would be four people conducting four entirely separate lives out of the same building, like businesses sharing space in a shopping arcade, their owners nodding to each other as they arrived early to roll up the shutters.” Impressively, Brooks finds a way to the greatest good for each of them.

 The pleasures of this novel’s writing, characters, and plot are fully equal to its good intentions.