'The Simp' review: Roshan Sethi skewers Hollywood with mixed results

Raj Ladlani hasn’t had much success in Hollywood, although he seems confident it begins with a lie… or as many as his imagination permits, actually.

The aspiring Indian actor lands one of his biggest roles by fabricating his character and background, ultimately landing an executive assistant job with an affluent industry family in Los Angeles. In essence, his proximity to the top still traces back to his talent for shapeshifting. It’s a fertile premise for filmmaker and screenwriter Roshan Sethi’s debut novel, but his ambitions almost always outpace the execution.

By no means hollow, The Simp is easier to enjoy than remember.

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The plot often feels secondary to the author’s accumulated observations about race, ambition and assimilation paired with the absurd, humiliating and soul-crushing protocols of the entertainment industry. At times, it resembles an assortment of jottings in search of a narrative sturdy enough to hold them together.

For anyone familiar with LA, the settings and tropes are easily recognizable: overpriced orange juice at Erewhon, drama school at the University of Southern California, and meeting Timothée Chalamet at San Vicente Bungalows all make predictable appearances. A city that inexhaustible, however, demands richer detail than its safest cultural shorthand.

While Sethi skewers the oblivious entitlement of Hollywood’s wealthy with comic precision, the book shines brightest in its satire of performative inclusivity. The protagonist constantly reshapes himself, switching between Raj and Ray, inventing a humbler upbringing and even strategically volunteering that he is gay because it makes him appear “more disarming.” His instinctive dishonesty becomes less a moral failing than another survival skill in an ecosystem where performance extends well beyond auditions.

The strongest voice belongs to Devon Prakesh, an Indian screenwriter whose indictment of representation, distilled into the phrase “perform your ethnicity,” echoes throughout the story. That line captures the suffocating expectations Raj constantly negotiates in an environment often at odds with the unfavorable overlaps that form his identity.

His insights into self-worth, self-doubt, and self-esteem are perceptive, but they don’t always come alive on the page. Narratives like The Simp are best shaped by firsthand experience, except this one is based largely on the life of Sethi’s husband. Much of the dialogue and characterization would arguably play better in a sitcom, where its sharp social observations could breathe without the burden of sustaining a novel.

Fast facts: ‘The Simp’

The Simp is at its most compelling when exposing Hollywood’s culture of performance, even if the novel never fully earns the emotional payoff its ideas promise.