On a bright day in September of 2001, Laura and her friends stand in a conference center lobby watching video footage, just a few seconds long but on a continuous loop, of planes flying into buildings. In the moments before they heard reports of the attacks on the World Trade Center, this group of graduate students had been considering what career possibilities lay before them. Then, all were glued to the television, watching “terrifying slow-motion clips of collapse” as symbols of modern America lay in pieces on the ground. As they listen to interviews with the victims’ families, first responders, and investigators, the young people try to make sense of the “firmer and firmer certainty [of] a basic uncertainty.”
Benefit, a startling debut by Siobhan Phillips that is both restrained and distressing, raises crucial questions about the role of capitalism and philanthropy in American society. The novel traces the lives of a group of American students who received prestigious Weatherfield fellowships to study at Oxford University after college. The main action of Benefit takes place not in the days after 9/11 but ten years later when the central characters have reunited in preparation for a fundraising gala celebrating the centennial of the Weatherfield Foundation. Most of the fellows have built careers that Laura sees as successful and influential. Justin has become a writer and brilliant social critic, living in Brooklyn. Greta, a new mother, is an assistant professor of anthropology at a liberal arts college. After a stint in the military, Mark is pursuing a political career. After years of employment as a financial consultant, Heather serves on the board of the Weatherfield Foundation itself.
Just as she did when they were all at Oxford, Laura questions whether she belongs in this crowd of privileged people. Unlike her peers, she has not made a lot of money nor garnered significant respect in her career. After receiving her PhD in literature, Laura accepted a poorly-paid adjunct professor job that barely paid her bills. Then, because of the vagaries of the academic job market, she lost that job and was forced to move in with her mother, a widow living in subsidized housing. Earlier, Laura’s mother had worked in the “development division” of the college where her husband had been employed. She hated the job: “You had to talk about money,” she explains to her daughter, “without ever mentioning money. It made me feel terrible.” She eventually quit and sought a job that was radically different: working for the college’s dining services, a job she enjoys not because she likes cooking but because it feels concretely necessary.
Needing money, Laura accepts a paid gig writing a “commemorative essay” for the Weatherfield Foundation’s centennial gala. As she begins to research the history of the Weatherfield family, she is surprised by what she discovers: the fortune was made on the backs of enslaved workers on sugar plantations and subjugated workers in processing factories. Their unpaid and underpaid work made their employers wealthy. At the turn of the 20th century, it was the interest on the investment of that wealth — the “money that money made” — that financed the fellowship program. By accepting the fellowship, she herself benefited from the spoils of generations of exploitation. And by accepting payment for this article, she realizes, she has not only accepted support again but has found herself in a situation where she cannot turn in a fully honest account.
Laura’s dissertation on Henry James prepares her well for her research about wealth at the cusp of the 20th century. James’s The Golden Bowl, the main focus of her academic work, tells the story of “a rich American father” and his “rich American daughter” who travel to Europe in order to buy fine art. At the end of the novel, the father has returned to America with a new bride and the daughter has stayed in Europe, married to a formerly penniless Italian: “She must turn from the man who gave her money,” as Laura explains, “to the man who married her for it.” The golden bowl mentioned in the title, intended to be a wedding present, has a crack in it. Most readers see it as “a clumsy symbol,” Laura says. “Everyone thinks it is too obvious. Then everyone argues over exactly what that means.” What is consistent between the various interpretations is the idea that the bowl’s flaw threatens to cause an explosion at any moment.
Although Laura believes her fellow Weatherfield peers are all living in comfort and privilege, the author of Benefit allows readers to see more complicated situations than Laura herself understands. All of them are scarred and self-destructive in their own ways, despite their successes. Heather’s romantic life is a series of promising relationships that keep fizzling out. Justin has trouble sticking with a job for more than a few months, and he struggles to complete his freelance writing assignments as well. Soon after having a child, Greta cheats on her wife — an experience that she calls “stupid and fun” — and forges a reconciliation with her that nevertheless feels tense. Their whole generation, the author seems to suggest, has been left with a reluctance to commit in a world where the future seems so unpredictable and things can fall apart at any moment. They are as fragile as James’s golden bowl.
The structure of the novel highlights a sense of potentially-explosive uncertainty. While the entire book is written from Laura’s perspective, Phillips constructs the chapters in varying forms and tones, mirroring the complicated path down which Laura travels. One chapter is a series of dated entries recounting daily events and occasionally stating only that Laura (the diarist) “was too tired to write anything.” Another chapter juxtaposes different elements of a single event, labeling some of the chapter’s paragraphs as “incident” and others as “character” in a sometimes dizzying distinction. Yet another chapter is an intricate and ambiguous braid of partially related thoughts. Sometimes there are transcripts of texted conversations or descriptions of imagined histories. The stylistic shifts in Laura’s narration in Benefit are often jarring and unexpected — a deliberate choice on the part of the author to leave the reader as unsettled as the characters are.
Phillips subtly repurposes James’s symbol of the golden bowl to point out not only the fragility of all the characters but also to expose how the capitalist system forces intellectuals and artists to be beholden to wealthy patrons. Laura understands that the Weatherfield Foundation and other similar philanthropic ventures exert an extensive influence that is both “not real” and yet also “ruthlessly real,” both “illusion” and “also inarguable.” Although she turns in her defanged historical essay to the Foundation, they reject it and decide to go “in a different direction” — requesting complimentary testimonials from former recipients instead. “Is this a relief?” Laura wonders to herself, or “is this a defeat?”
Heather promises Laura that she will nonetheless be paid for her work. She then asks Laura to accompany her as she shops for a new ballgown for the benefit gala. She pressures her to buy a dress for herself as well, but Laura resists. Soon, for reasons that are not completely clear, she changes her mind. She decides to attend the event, buys the dress, and even submits a short historical summary for the Foundation website.
Near the end of the Weatherfield centennial benefit, Laura has a series of conversations that finally open her eyes to the ways the Foundation has constricted not only her own expectations for her future but the expectations of all the fellows. She realizes she is no longer ashamed of her own position in the world or jealous of the lives she had long thought her peers were leading.
When she takes a wrong turn on her way out of the gala ballroom, Laura finds herself in the conference center’s industrial kitchen. A friendly young woman wearing a chef’s coat offers Laura a slice of leftover cake from the benefit. Laura accepts the dessert, eating it with her fingers off a paper napkin. Perhaps thinking of her mother’s choice to trade development work for kitchen work she felt was more ethical, Laura leaves through a service exit into the uncertain promise of a different future.
Benefit is a fascinating twist on the typical campus novel. While most such novels acknowledge the presence of rigorous hierarchies in academia, Phillips adds a sophisticated and intensely sharp critique of how capitalism has weaponized the system of meritocracy in a way that has left young scholars in uncertain and underpaid situations. Phillips, a Rhodes Scholar, has been able to forge a different path from Laura’s and is an associate professor at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania.
[Published by Bellevue Literary Press on April 19, 2022, 320 pages, $17.99 paperback original]