Early in Kevin Kwan’s latest novel, “Sex and Vanity,” a guest at a crazy, rich, partially Asian wedding on the island of Capri observes, “Everybody with money has become so cookie-cutter—they dress the same, collect the same ten artists, stay at the same hotels.” She adds, “They all want to be miserable and dissatisfied in the same place”—which, for some of Kwan’s muses during the pandemic, meant wherever the masks were off.
“People were partying in Santorini, going to Tulum,” Kwan, who wore a navy polo and round glasses, said the other day, at a rooftop restaurant in West Hollywood. “A whole population of the crazy rich moved to Hawaii.” But Kwan stayed put in L.A., scrolling until his thumb hurt. “It got to the point where I had to turn my phone off,” he said. He did have a number of one-per-center friends, though, who surprised him. “They could have hopped on their planes, but didn’t,” he said. “They really adhered to the guidelines.”
Kwan is good at finding mensches among millionaires. Born into wealth in Singapore, Kwan, who is forty-seven, befriended a fellow rich kid when he was an intern at Interview magazine, in New York, in the late nineties. She invited him to her family’s house on Long Island. “I had a fantasy of the Hamptons,” he said. “This was so not it.” The family had a nineteenth-century barn with canoes and kayaks hanging from the rafters. The cushions were threadbare, the Danish furniture cracked.
He felt at home. “What fascinated me was how similar her parents were to people that I grew up with in Singapore,” he said. “It’s about driving that dilapidated S.U.V. with the dog hair on the blanket, old wicker, ancestral portraits of, like, the clipper ships that previous generations had. It was a revelation to meet people who were snobby in the same way.”
Kwan started a creative consultancy and co-wrote “Luck: The Essential Guide,” before he broke out with the novel “Crazy Rich Asians.” Recently, he’s spent some time in the milieu of Amtrak Joe: through Mathew Littman, a former Biden speechwriter who corrals Hollywood types for political causes, Kwan served as a surrogate during the Biden campaign and now participates in occasional calls with White House advisers. “I wrote a lot of angry speeches,” he said. “To get on a Zoom and see two hundred A.A.P.I. volunteers, I was, like, ‘Oh, my God,’ ” he said. “Maybe I’m stereotyping, but it takes a lot to get the Asian volunteer out.”
Last summer, COVID scuttled Kwan’s plans to go to Capri, a place he’s visited more than ten times, to celebrate the release of “Sex and Vanity.” To see whether a visit this summer might be feasible, he called Holly Star, a friend on the ground there.
“The vibe is a lot brighter,” Star said, on a video call, dangly earrings tinkling. But, she said, people are still wearing masks, and “we have a curfew at 11 P.M.”
“11 P.M. is not going to cut it,” Kwan said. “I mean, people have dinner at eleven.” He then talked about the night, in 2016, that he ate dinner at Michel’angelo, the restaurant Star used to manage with her husband, and heard the story of how she ended up living on the island. “It’s a six-hundred-million blockbuster rom-com,” he said.
Scene: the piazza of Capri, 2013. Enter: a single Aussie girl on holiday, map askew. She nervously dines solo at her hotel, until the bartender urges her to see the town and makes a reservation at a restaurant for her.
“I was alone,” Star said. “I had my book and my phone placed strategically so I had an escape if someone wanted to talk.” When she asked for the check, the owner brought a torta caprese al limone. Then he brought a limoncello. Using Google Translate on their phones, they conversed until 5 A.M. (Important questions, such as “Do you have a wife?”)
“We were married within a year,” Star said. Her Australian friends were shocked. “Since then we’ve had two children,” she went on. “I’m very realistic. People might believe my story is romantic, but everybody knows that, after children, life is not so exciting.”
“A lot of people have a fantasy of Capri,” Kwan said. “You had no preconceived notion. That’s what made it possible.”
“You could come here and write a book,” she said. “I’ve been trying to get Kevin to move here. Come on, Kevin.”
“Trying,” Kwan said. “My lottery numbers haven’t come up yet.” ♦