“We forget, sometimes, that empires crumble not from external forces alone, but from the quiet erosion of principles that once stood as their foundation.”
Tucked within the pages of Sarah Wynn-Williams’ debut lurks a narrative that simmers with urgency yet unfolds with the patient wisdom of ancient parables.
Careless People doesn’t merely echo Fitzgerald’s observation about the wealthy in The Great Gatsby – those who “smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money” – but rather excavates deeper terrain, unearthing the skeletal structure of power’s corrupting embrace.
The Seduction of Moral Compromise
Against Manhattan’s glass-and-steel monuments to capitalism and Washington’s marble temples of governance, we meet Eleanor Harlow.
Whip-smart and Yale-polished, she arrives armed with policy briefs and uncompromising ideals. Her transformation – that slow-motion ethical collapse – happens not in dramatic plunges but in nearly imperceptible shifts, like a landscape altered by decades of gentle erosion rather than sudden earthquake.
Wynn-Williams captures this metamorphosis with unnerving precision:
“Eleanor noticed it first in language—how ‘problematic’ became ‘challenging,’ then ‘nuanced,’ and finally ‘necessary.’ The linguistic gymnastics preceded the ethical ones, as though by renaming the compromise she could somehow transmute its nature.”
Such passages reveal Wynn-Williams’ anthropological eye – corruption seldom announces itself with villainous cackles but sneaks in through the side door of reasonable accommodation.
Eleanor’s trajectory from bright-eyed idealist to Washington insider unfolds alongside her relationship with Senator Lawrence, a mentor whose gravelly cynicism masks genuine affection. “I’m here to make policy, not politics,” Eleanor declares upon arrival, her certainty unweathered by experience. Lawrence responds not with mockery but with a smile carrying the weight of accumulated wisdom – a silent prophecy of her coming disillusionment.
The novel’s brilliance emerges in Eleanor’s interior monologues, where self-justification blooms like hothouse flowers:
“She told herself it was pragmatism, not compromise—the difference between idealism and impact. After all, wasn’t partial progress better than moral purity that accomplished nothing? The thought comforted her as she drafted the amended proposal, excising the very provisions she had once considered non-negotiable.”
By showing us Eleanor’s rationalizations in real-time, Wynn-Williams implicates us in her compromises. Haven’t we all manufactured similar justifications? Wouldn’t we, given similar circumstances, fashion comparable excuses?
The Architecture of Power
Rarely has a novel mapped power’s intricate architecture with such surgical precision. Rather than portraying institutions as monolithic entities, Wynn-Williams reveals them as ecosystems – delicate webs of favors, unspoken agreements, and cultivated relationships. Senator Lawrence’s explanation of Washington realities carries the sting of uncomfortable recognition:
“The tragedy isn’t that good people are corrupted by power, Eleanor. It’s that they come to believe their corrupted selves are still good. That’s the real alchemy of this place—how it transforms self-interest into perceived public service.”
Wynn-Williams doesn’t merely tell us about power’s workings; she shows us its machinery in motion. Her depiction of a weekend retreat at a financier’s Hamptons estate reads like anthropological field notes from society’s upper strata. Social hierarchies assert themselves through whispers rather than declarations:
“The true power players never raised their voices. They spoke in modulated tones about consequential matters as though discussing the weather, while those aspiring to their status compensated with volume and certainty. Eleanor recognized with sudden clarity that she had been speaking too loudly all evening.”
Such observations cut beyond typical critiques of wealth to expose something more fundamental – how power communicates itself through codes invisible to outsiders but blindingly clear to insiders.
The Character Constellation
Through Eleanor’s eyes, we encounter a kaleidoscope of responses to power’s gravitational pull.
Richard Kline, Eleanor’s college friend turned financial alchemist, embraces wealth’s rewards with refreshing if disturbing candor. Where Eleanor needs moral justification, Richard dispenses with such niceties:
“At least I’m honest about my dishonesty,” he tells her over drinks at an exclusive Manhattan club. “I don’t need to believe I’m saving the world while I profit from it. That’s your particular delusion, Eleanor.”
More devastating still is Margot Chen, Eleanor’s former comrade-in-idealism who now crafts messaging for pharmaceutical giants. Their reunion – staged in a restaurant where a single meal costs more than many Americans earn in a day – delivers one of the novel’s most cutting exchanges:
“Remember how we used to joke about selling out?” Margot asks, swirling expensive scotch in her glass. “The joke was thinking we’d recognize it when it happened. The real trick is how it happens so incrementally you never have to admit to yourself that’s what you’ve done.”
Haunting the novel’s margins is Davis Montgomery, an elderly civil servant whose cramped office – windowless, paper-stacked, and consultated by none – stands as physical embodiment of marginalized integrity. His brief appearance functions as a vanishing species sighting: the career public servant whose institutional memory holds truths no one bothers to access anymore.
The Invisible Victims
Wynn-Williams refuses to let us forget that policy decisions measured in polling points and market fluctuations translate into lived human experiences. A regulatory tweak discussed over artisanal cocktails manifests as factory closures in Ohio. Financial innovations praised in quarterly reports cause foreclosures across Phoenix suburbs.
Her prose turns especially luminous when addressing this manufactured distance:
“The distance between decision and consequence was her anesthetic. Eleanor never saw the faces of those affected by what she now called ‘necessary compromises.’ Distance wasn’t just a physical reality but a cultivated perspective—the careful cultivation of not knowing what one didn’t wish to know.”
This observation that carelessness requires active maintenance rather than mere neglect gives the novel its moral center without descending into preachiness.
Most gutting is the chapter documenting ripple effects from Eleanor’s “market stabilization package.” Auto worker James Henley watches his pension evaporate; health worker Sophia Mendez scrambles as clinic funding disappears; teacher Rebecca Walsh witnesses her students’ families face eviction waves. These characters never encounter Eleanor directly, yet their fates intertwine with her policy recommendations.
What elevates these sections above simple morality tales is Wynn-Williams’ refusal to flatten her characters into mere victims. They possess agency, complexity, and their own moral compromises:
“James didn’t want pity or righteousness from those who had never lived paycheck to paycheck. What he wanted was what had been promised the dignity of a system that functioned according to stated principles rather than hidden influences.”
Through such passages, Wynn-Williams implicates not just individuals but systems designed to separate decisions from their human consequences.
Stylistic Virtuosity
Wynn-Williams writes with chameleon-like versatility her prose shifts from boardroom precision to lyrical introspection with seamless grace. Metaphors function not as ornamental flourishes but as precision instruments revealing hidden connections, as when she describes government-finance relationships:
“They moved like dance partners who despised each other’s choreography yet remained locked in mutual dependence, each convinced they were leading while being led.”
The novel’s structure deserves particular acclaim. Wynn-Williams orchestrates three interwoven timelines – Eleanor’s idealistic beginnings, her power ascension, and aftermath of a financial crisis partly stemming from her policies. Rather than employing this structure as mere clever device, she creates resonances between cause and delayed effect, decision and distant consequence.
Particularly masterful is her deployment of recurring objects. A crystal paperweight gifted early in Eleanor’s career appears throughout the narrative, its symbolic weight accumulating with each appearance. Initially representing clarity of purpose, it gradually transforms into emblem of fragility, distortion, and finally, unbearable heaviness.
Historical Echoes and Contemporary Whispers
While Careless People plants roots in the distinguished soil of American political fiction – nodding to Robert Penn Warren and Ward Just – it flowers with distinctly contemporary concerns. Wynn-Williams explores how digital information ecosystems create unprecedented forms of both transparency and obfuscation in governance.
In one particularly sharp scene, Eleanor and her team craft deliberately impenetrable policy language:
“Make it complex enough that explaining it would exceed their word count,” her colleague advises. “By tomorrow’s news cycle, it won’t matter anyway.”
Though never explicitly named, the 2008 financial crisis haunts the novel’s margins. Wynn-Williams examines not merely regulatory failure’s mechanics but the cultural conditions enabling widespread institutional blindness. Her analysis challenges simplistic greed narratives, suggesting instead systemic incentives rewarding short-term thinking while punishing meaningful accountability.
An Emotional Reckoning Without Resolution
Beneath its political veneer, Careless People pulses with emotional complexity. Eleanor’s journey crescendos with moments of shattering self-recognition that arrive too late to alter her trajectory. When she finally confronts her choices’ consequences, Wynn-Williams captures the moment with devastating economy:
“She had imagined corruption as something that happened to other people—weaker people, greedier people. Now she understood its true nature. It wasn’t the dramatic fall from grace but the slow, almost imperceptible lowering of standards until one day you looked up and couldn’t recognize the distance you had traveled.”
This recognition arrives without catharsis—a courageous authorial choice refusing readers the comfort of neat moral resolution.
The emotional complexity extends to Eleanor’s personal relationships, particularly her estrangement from sister Rachel, a public defender whose life choices create not simplistic moral contrast but something thornier:
“They had become strangers not because one had compromised while the other stood firm, but because they no longer shared a language to discuss what compromise even meant.”
The Question of Redemption
Wynn-Williams makes the bold choice to deny readers satisfying redemptive arcs. Eleanor’s moments of clarity don’t spark heroic whistleblowing or dramatic course corrections. Instead, we witness the more complex reality of how people accommodate themselves to their own moral failures.
In the novel’s final section, Eleanor has retreated to teaching at a small college – a position that appears as potential penance but which Wynn-Williams reveals as something more ambiguous:
“She taught them the ideals she had once believed in, and on good days, still did. She did not tell them how those ideals would be tested, eroded, and compromised. That knowledge would come soon enough. Sometimes she wondered if her silence on this matter was her final act of carelessness.”
This refusal of moral closure might frustrate those seeking catharsis, but it honors the subject matter’s complexity. The systems Wynn-Williams depicts resist individual heroics, designed instead to absorb and neutralize both criticism and reform attempts.
Rating: ★★★★★
Careless People earns five stars not merely for literary accomplishment but for its unflinching timeliness. In our era of eroding institutional trust and seemingly justified cynicism about power, Wynn-Williams offers not just cautionary tale but vocabulary for understanding how good intentions become compromised and systems designed for public good gradually redirect toward self-perpetuation.
The novel succeeds across multiple dimensions: character study, institutional critique, philosophical inquiry into responsibility’s nature, and pure literary achievement. Wynn-Williams announces herself not just as promising talent but as fully-formed literary force whose insight into power dynamics feels simultaneously immediate and eternal.
Critical Reception and Authorial Background
Careless People has sparked vigorous critical conversation since publication. The New York Times dubbed it “a moral thriller for our age of institutional decay,” while The Atlantic praised it as “the rare political novel that prioritizes ethical complexity over ideological certainty.” Facile comparisons to shows like Succession and House of Cards miss the novel’s more sophisticated examination of systemic rather than merely personal corruption.
More telling has been the novel’s reception in political circles, where it reportedly circulates as uncomfortable required reading. An unnamed former White House staffer confessed to The New Yorker: “Reading it felt like having someone articulate all the compromises you’ve justified to yourself over the years. It’s an uncomfortable mirror.”
Wynn-Williams brings unusual credentials to her fiction. Before turning to writing, she navigated both international finance and government advisory roles – experiences informing the novel’s insider perspective. In interviews, she has discussed her fascination with “the psychology of institutional belonging” and how organizations reshape individual ethical frameworks.
Unlike political novelists who position themselves as outside critics, Wynn-Williams writes with the complicated insight of someone who has navigated these waters personally. This perspective lends the novel particular potency—it criticizes without self-righteousness and illuminates without claiming moral superiority to the world it depicts.
Final Thoughts
Truly consequential literature functions simultaneously as mirror and window – reflecting our own compromise potential while providing views into worlds otherwise invisible to us.
Careless People achieves this dual function with extraordinary grace. Wynn-Williams has crafted a novel deserving placement alongside political fiction classics, not merely for its institutional insights but for what it reveals about human nature when tested by power’s proximity.
The book concludes without offering reassurance or promising that awareness alone protects us from becoming what we once condemned. Instead, it leaves us haunted by essential questions: In a world structured to reward carelessness, what would genuine care resemble? What sacrifices might true care demand of us?
Most provocatively, the novel suggests that carelessness’s most dangerous form isn’t active malice but the comfortable distance we maintain from our choices’ consequences. As Eleanor reflects in the novel’s final pages:
“The opposite of care isn’t hate. It’s the luxury of not having to know.”
In our cultural moment characterized by increasing separation between decision-makers and those affected by their decisions, Wynn-Williams has delivered not merely superb fiction but essential diagnosis – a work helping us recognize our own capacity for carelessness before its consequences become irreparable.
- Publisher: Riverhead Books
- Publication Date: February 2025
- Pages: 384
- Genre: Literary Fiction/Political Drama
- Themes: Power, moral compromise, institutional corruption, self-deception
- Structure: Three interlinked narrative timelines spanning approximately 15 years
- Setting: Primarily Washington D.C. and New York, with crucial sections in Midwestern and Southern communities
- Recommended for: Readers of Jonathan Franzen, Rachel Kushner, and Tom Wolfe; anyone interested in the psychology of power and institutional ethics
