Andrew Ridker’s debut novel ‘The Altruists’ flips the concept of millennial dependency on its head

When Andrew Ridker graduated from Washington University and moved to New York City to work in publishing, he complicated feelings, both about his peers who were making bank working in finance jobs and about his less well-off friends doing good at places like Teach for America. And he was doing neither. “I caught myself sort of sitting in judgment of people. I had to look at myself and say, ‘Why are these things troubling me so much?’ I think part of it was working in a sort of in-between place.”

It was from that in-between place that Ridker wrote, over the course of two years, from age 23 to 25, his “super brilliant, super funny” (in the words of Gary Shteyngart) debut novel, The Altruists, set largely in St. Louis and out March 5. It started with Maggie, a graduate of the fictitious Danforth University (read: Wash. U.), who moves to NYC and works a series of low-low-paying nonprofit internships before becoming a part-time nanny to two young boys. Maggie has an inheritance from her mother, Francine, but refuses to spend it. Her older brother, Ethan, does the opposite. He’s broke, having spent his Francine money on Brooklyn real estate after leaving his job. But the beauty of Ridker’s book lies in their widower boomer father, Arthur, an academic at Danforth who never achieved tenure and whose finances are possibly in even worse shape than either Maggie’s or Ethan’s—and even though he’s nearly estranged from both his children, he needs their help. The plot flashes back and forth between Ethan and Maggie paying a special visit to Arthur in the present and Arthur and Francine before marriage and children, in locales as varied as Paris and Zimbabwe.

It’s a kind of inheritance plot, Ridker says, like the ones from Victorian literature with a dying patriarch, his children and grandchildren rushing to his deathbed to curry favor and fortune. But turn the plot on its head, and there you have Arthur, Maggie, and Ethan.

“With Arthur, I liked this idea of putting a man of that stripe in a position of wanting and needing something and the irony of flipping it like that and having him need something from his kids. Not just because it would be interesting to see a Boomer sort of need to hit up his millennial kids for money—though that was certainly on my mind—but also just because I think he’s the kind of guy who thinks in his own mind that he’s got it together, sort of baby boomer patriarchal authority figure, and I thought that there would be a lot of opportunity for comedy to see someone like that have the heat turned up under him and have to scramble a bit.” Take what you hear about millennial dependency, and flip it.

Ridker, who grew up in a progressive neighborhood outside Boston, says the major theme he wanted to explore was what it means to be a good person, where values come from in terms of inheritance and in terms of what we choose for ourselves as adults. That he does it so well and with such humor his first time out means the author has chosen well for himself.

Ridker will discuss The Altruists at 7 p.m. March 19 at Mad Art Gallery (2727 S. 12th).