CABS – Andrew Ridker

Andrew Ridker
The Altruists

The death of family matriarch, Francine, disrupts the precarious bonds between her children and her husband, Arthur, whose life has reached a breaking point. Unable to continue making payments on the mortgage of the family home, Arthur writes his millennial children, Ethan and Maggie, inviting them back to St. Louis. Arthur’s connection with his kids has always been strained. His invitation unleashes a flurry of lifelong resentment, pain, and (maybe) a little pity, as both children are struggling to reckon with the loss of their mother, the disappointment of their father, and the unexpected inheritance Francine left for them. With a dark, funny tone, The Altruists explores the friction between the baby boomers who resent the “entitlement” of younger generations, and millennials disenchanted by an American dream.

Andrew Ridker was born in 1991. His writing has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Paris Review Daily, Guernica, Boston Review, The Believer, and St. Louis Magazine; and he is the editor of Privacy Policy: The Anthology of Surveillance Poetics. He is the recipient of an Iowa Arts Fellowship from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. The Altruists is his first novel.

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