“You never know about the people pulling the actual strings of life in America,” author Teddy Wayne tells Esquire, “because they’re completely out of sight.”
In Wayne’s newest novel, The Winner, these unseen kingmakers come into stark close-up—and the portrait is none too flattering. We see “the real winners of America” through the wide eyes of Conor O’Toole, a college athlete raised by working-class parents in Yonkers, New York. Fresh out of law school, Conor decamps to coastal Massachusetts for a luxurious summer: In exchange for tennis lessons, he’ll receive free lodging at a guest cottage on Cutter’s Neck, a gated oceanfront community for the grotesquely wealthy. He looks forward to a quiet summer of teaching tennis by day, then studying for the bar exam and applying for jobs by night.
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