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50 pages 1 hour read

Ana Huang

King of Greed

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2023

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Themes

Maintaining Independence in Relationships

The last realization that Alessandra makes before deciding to divorce Dominic is that she has lost her individuality during the years of her dysfunctional marriage. In a stark moment of clarity, she looks in the mirror and only sees a “shell of [her]self,” realizing that “[if she] didn’t get out while [she] could, [she]’d dissolve into dust, nothing more than a collection of lost time and unrealized dreams” (33). Upon leaving her marriage to Dominic, Alessandra reclaims some of the independence that she lost while she remained focused on being a supportive wife to her overly ambitious husband.

Alessandra’s first step toward increasing her independence is to rent a space to set up a physical shop for her business, Floria Designs. This decision reflects her determination “to take control and create [her] own future” (65) instead of continuing to put herself last. Although Dominic’s failure to prioritize her well-being over his business practices causes most of the issues in their marriage, Alessandra also recognizes that she is not completely blameless, for her failure to communicate has allowed their issues to fester. Her passivity and willingness to accept the dissatisfying status quo cause her to lose her sense of identity. As she tells Dominic, “Everything I did, everything I gave up and endured was for you” (108). While he is at fault for taking advantage of her, Alessandra is guilty of failing to set boundaries or maintain her independence in their relationship. This dynamic becomes part of a larger personal issue that she brings into many of her relationships. For example, when she visits her brother, Marcelo, he is happy to see her living for herself and reminds her that she skipped her own senior trip to help him study for an English test; she also took care of him while their mother was away traveling, working, or dating. This scene reveals that Alessandra has spent her life living for others instead of living for herself.

Likewise, Alessandra has spent her entire marriage waiting at home for Dominic to return from work, when she should have been going out and living her life. Being single after their divorce allows Alessandra to make up for lost time. She goes to bars, spends time with her friends, visits her family, and takes trips that she previously would have skipped whenever Dominic did not come along. These new ways of asserting her individuality allow her to become a stronger, more well-rounded person, and these learning experiences ultimately help her forge a healthier relationship with Dominic by the end of the novel.

Prioritizing Love over Ambition

The most prevalent theme in King of Greed can be seen in Huang’s emphasis on the importance of choosing love over ambition, and the very title of the novel implies that Dominic has always had his priorities backward in this regard. His work/life balance is abysmal, and he constantly breaks promises in his personal life in order to further his career. Only when Alessandra leaves him does he finally realize his error, for when he follows her to Brazil, he admits, “Work will always be there […] Other things won’t” (142). This moment represents his first clear change in priorities, indicating that Alessandra’s departure from his life has put many things into perspective.

Dominic’s character development—and the status of his relationship with Alessandra—both depend on his willingness to prioritize his personal connections over his business goals, consistently and without fault. Although he promises to change and to prove his priorities to Alessandra, she refuses to forgive him right away, understanding his propensity to make promises and then fail to keep them if they conflict with his work or his pursuit of wealth. By resisting his pursuit for as long as she does, Alessandra forces Dominic to work on proving himself through his actions, not just with empty words.

During the divorce process, it becomes clear that Dominic’s emphasis on work and wealth does not stem from his love of these concepts in and of themselves. Instead, he is driven to overcome a barely acknowledged fear of failure; by succeeding in the business world, he believes that he is overcoming the low expectations that everyone had of him when he was a child. Notably, when he is faced with the realization that Alessandra may claim half of his assets if he does not agree to sign the divorce papers, he doesn’t care about the financial implications of this possibility. He is far more focused on his dismay over the thought of losing her, and the thought of losing half of his fortune pales in comparison. In a rare moment of intimacy with Alessandra after their split, he admits that he “loved her, and […] missed having her in [his] arms so damn bad that [he] would give up every possession just to freeze this moment in time” (101). This admission hints that Dominic really is capable of changing himself for the better and that Dominic’s work and his wealth are less meaningful to him than his love for Alessandra.

In comparison to Dominic, Alessandra has never chosen ambition over love, despite coming from a well-off family. In fact, she has the opposite flaw: sacrificing her ambitions wholesale in order to prioritize her marriage. This in turn has led to difficulties with maintaining her individuality. Alessandra repeatedly asserts that their split reflects “a fundamental disconnect in [their] values and what [they] deemed important for a good relationship” (33). Thus, Dominic’s ambition overshadows everything else, when all Alessandra wants from him is quality time and genuine affection.

The Illusory Connection between Wealth and Happiness

To Dominic, his wealth correlates to his worth, and he mistakenly believes that in order to achieve happiness, he must increase his wealth. His pride and his focus on wealth are evident in the fact that he often refers to himself as “the unwanted foster kid from Ohio turned king of Wall Street. The pauper turned billionaire. The unlovable turned husband” (108-09). This self-perception reveals that he believes his own worth is tied to his financial and professional success. Thus, the converse is also true; he believes that if he cannot increase his wealth, he has no worth at all, and this “shadow” belief becomes a silent poison that ruins his marriage. At the start of the novel, Dominic believes himself happy, but it isn’t until he takes a break from his work and spends time with Alessandra in Brazil that he realizes that he overworks due to his fear of failure. In reality, his true contentment comes from making a life with Alessandra. After going through the necessary mindset and lifestyle changes to mend their relationship, Dominic finally finds contentment.

For many of the novel’s early chapters, however, Dominic carries the flawed belief that having the best of everything will lead him to happiness, and he does not realize the error of his ways until Alessandra leaves him in utter frustration, disillusioned by his seeming indifference to her. Early scenes reveal Dominic’s compulsive focus on material wealth, for in Chapter 4, Dominic mentions that although their current penthouse is nice enough, he “already had [his] eye on a bigger, even more expensive penthouse” (23). He sees the acquisition of luxury real estate as a concrete symbol of his success, wealth, and status, not as an investment in his family’s future. By the end of the novel, however, when he finally wins Alessandra back, he embraces this inner change in himself by moving them from the lavish penthouse to a cozy brownstone and decorating the new home with meaningful things rather than status symbols. Thus, Dominic’s character growth comes with his recognition that money cannot buy happiness. Though his penthouse will always represent the “first big sign that [he]’d made it” (309), the brownstone is something that he buys specifically for him and Alessandra, and it comes to represent the life that they wish to build together. This switch in homes therefore symbolizes a switch in his priorities. The penthouse symbolized his prioritization of wealth and career, while the brownstone symbolizes his prioritization of Alessandra and their family.

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