Who Is a Beneficiary? You Are.

In The Beneficiary, Bruce Robbins wants to make room for the note of guilt in our songs of gratitude. Who is a beneficiary? Robbins’s answer is that it is probably you. Readers of books such as his, and reviews such as this, can claim high-level literacy with all its associated and metropolitan comforts and liberties. They can also recognize their indebtedness to others — not just as a matter of unequal luck, but of systematic unfairness.