EasyBy Roshan Sethi
In 2023, an ad seeking a personal assistant for an unnamed “art world family” from New York went viral. Many were shocked by the ridiculously demanding scope of the job, which included arranging meetings and travel, babysitting and handling “dog systems”, cleaning, repairs and gardening. Key Directive: “To make life easier for the couple in every possible way.”
What was also surprising was how innocently these pampered people expressed their needs in such vulgar detail. Some wondered who would want to start this program at even lower wages. Roshan Sethi’s “The Simp”, billed as a “novel without a hero” like Thackeray’s “Vanity Fair”, and dedicated to “the unnamed family whose real-life advertising inspired this work of fiction”, attempts to answer that question in a sly, humorous way.
Sethi sets the action in Los Angeles, and our non-hero, an unemployed actor named Raj Ladlani, is courted by an “entertainment family.” We are now in the realm of Hollywood satire, and this debut novelist displays a strong sense of the genre. Perhaps this is no surprise, since Sethi is also a successful filmmaker – not to mention a practicing oncologist.
Despite his titular surname, or perhaps because of it, Raj is a fascinating character, full of rich contradictions. A young gay man from a wealthy New Delhi family studied drama at USC and is now achieving stardom. His parents, frustrated by his refusal to take over the family auto parts business, broke up with him before leaving him an orphan.
Given the paucity of roles for a brown-skinned actor, Raj ekes out a living with menial labor and spends the rest of his time doing scene work with his elderly coach – Shakespeare, Chekhov, Mamet – who is single-handedly proud of his pupil’s gifts. “You are a true actor,” he tells Raj. “You tell true lies.” This is the teacher’s “highest praise.”
Raj lies less truthfully in his resume, and his fake experience, coupled with a fabricated story about a poor upbringing in rural India, convinces white Hollywood A-listers, Jim and Anna, that Raj is the perfect (serving, discreet, grateful) person for the position. Soon Raj’s days consist of an endless flurry of tasks in service of this demonstratively sensitive power couple and their heartbreakingly neglected child.
When he’s not attending to his administrative duties or heading to Erewhon to buy lamb and kale for Anna’s pitbulls, Raj must be paying attention to the mind games of post-Tarantino writer Jim, whose hobbies include ironic racism, vigorous swimming in his home’s glass-bottomed pool, and complaining bitterly about interruptions to his creative process.
It is Jim who first calls his overly agreeable assistant “simpleton”, among other small things. Raj soon faces a series of “leaks”, moments when he finds the pressure of being consummate, the fact of self-effacement too much for him to bear.
Temporary relief is accompanied by increasing episodes of reckless behavior, including phone hacks, closet ransacking, and an autoerotic lapse in his employer’s guest room, where he fantasizes about “ruthlessly” ruining him by “rude, flamboyant” entertainment executives. Sethi’s stoic narration strikes a fine balance between tenderness and rebuke for his protagonist’s self-loathing and duplicity.
Beneath the novel’s starkness, with its stinging depiction of this rarefied Tinseltown milieu, “The Simp” painfully but, in Sethi’s hands, bleakly comical confronts the dreams of fame of race and colonial history. The story is set in 2021, when the Black Lives Matter movement has shaken but not affected Hollywood. “Now you guys have all the power,” Jim tells Raj, and though he claims he’s joking, we know guys like him are feeling pretty fragile.
We also know that, despite some equity infiltration, most faces in the studios and at ceremonies will remain pale. But what haunts the novel interestingly is the question of how much of Raj’s showbiz failure can be reduced to the color of his skin, and how much to the fact that his talent and charisma are inadequate in the Hollywood system, where almost no one makes it.
“The Simp” is refracted, at various times, through cultural sources ranging from Thackeray to “Pilgrim’s Progress,” “King Lear,” “Slumdog Millionaire,” the Zac Efron vehicle “Gold,” to the life of Buddha. But finally, we are back with Raj, who may or may not have achieved dramatic success, but who has found a small niche where his talent can shine for a lucky few.
Still, this exceedingly smart and funny novel ultimately suggests that unless the world is run by rich, entitled monsters, most of us will spend at least a portion of our time on Earth in some degree of simplicity. Or as Howard, the couple’s Black cook, who takes a more philosophical approach to the situation, explains: “It’s a job.”
Easy | By Roshan Sethi | simon and schuster | 292 pp. | $28
