17 minute read
THE FAMILY CHAO by Lan Samantha Chang
glory
GLORY
Bulawayo, NoViolet Viking (416 pp.) $27.00 | March 8, 2022 978-0-52-556113-2
A nation of animals is stirred to revolt in the face of decadeslong dictatorial rule. Bulawayo’s second novel—following We Need New Names (2013)—opens with the decline of Old Horse, the longtime authoritarian leader of the African nation of Jidada who is, literally, an old horse. His regime is out of touch when it isn’t actively corrupt—a (pig) crony priest emptily sings his praises, his (canine) generals support his hard-line attitude, and his (donkey) wife turns a deaf ear to protesters. When Old Horse dies, the menagerie of citizens is cautiously hopeful for reform—cats, pigs, and other disgruntled creatures tweet out their fury, echoing contemporary themes of frustration with right-wing, egotistical leaders. (The unnamed U.S. president is a “Tweeting Baboon.”) Of course, the new horse is the same as the old horse: Tuvius, aka Tuvy, arrives with plenty of rhetoric about a “New Dispensation,” but he quickly proves himself greedy, egotistical, and belligerent toward all who cross him. A counterweight comes in the form of Destiny, a goat and writer raised on memories of the old regime’s violence. Bulawayo’s use of animals gives the story a bit of quirkiness, and she writes sinuous prose rich with repetition and intensifiers that conjure a mood of an epic folktale. But the characters are so fundamentally human in behavior and action—tweeting, jet-setting, slaughtering—that the setup scarcely qualifies as an allegory. And for a novel of such breadth, its arc is straightforward; Tuvy is so cartoonishly dim, Destiny so straightforwardly heroic, and Jidadans’ rhetoric so well-worn (“What do we have to do in order for our bodies, our lives, our dreams, our futures, to finally matter?”) that the conclusions feel overly familiar despite its offbeat conceit.
A lyrical if rote tale of dominance and resistance.
THE FAMILY CHAO
Chang, Lan Samantha Norton (320 pp.) $28.00 | Feb. 1, 2022 978-0-393-86807-4
A Chinese American family reckons with its patriarch’s murder in this modern-day reboot of The Brothers Karamazov. When James, the youngest of the three Chao brothers, returns home to Wisconsin from college for Christmas, he’s braced for drama. His imperious, abrasive father, Leo, has driven his mother to a Buddhist sanctuary. The middle brother, Ming, made his fortune in New York to escape the family’s orbit and is only grudgingly visiting. And the eldest brother, Dagou, has labored at the family restaurant for years in hopes of a stake in the business only to be publicly rebuffed by Leo. Leo is murderously frustrating, so it’s not exactly surprising when he’s found dead, trapped in the restaurant’s freezer room, its escape key suspiciously absent. Chang’s well-turned third novel neatly balances two substantial themes. One is the blast radius of family dysfunction; the novel is largely told from James’ (more innocent) perspective, but Chang deftly shows how each of the brothers, and the partners, exes, and onlookers around them, struggles to make sense of Leo and his death. (Handily, the plural of Chao is chaos.) The second is the way anti-immigrant attitudes warp the truth and place additional pressure on an overstressed family: When one of the brothers faces trial for Leo’s death, news reports and local gossip are full of crude stereotypes about the “Brothers Karamahjong” and rumors of the restaurant serving dog meat. As with Dostoevsky’s original, the story culminates in a trial that becomes a stage for broader debates over obligation, morality, and family. But Chang is excellent at exploring this at a more intimate level as well. A later plot twist deepens the tension and concludes a story that
smartly offers only gray areas in response to society’s demands for simplicity and assurance.
A disruptive, sardonic take on the assimilation story.
THE GREAT MRS. ELIAS
Chase-Riboud, Barbara Amistad/HarperCollins (416 pp.) $22.99 | Feb. 8, 2022 978-0-06-301990-4
The story of a Black woman who became a millionaire a century ago. This completes the author’s quintet of historical novels about what she calls “invisible” women of color whose significant stories have been erased. Hannah Elias certainly has a significant story. She was born Bessie Davis in 1865 to a struggling family in Philadelphia. In this fictional version of her life she was raped as a child, unjustly imprisoned for theft as a teen, and cast out by her family. She became a sex worker to survive and soon moved up to running bordellos. Moving to New York City, she cultivated upper-class admirers, a goal made easier by her ability to easily pass as White, and parlayed her success into a real estate empire. By the time she was in her 30s she was one of the richest Black people in the country but little known—she was careful to avoid scandal. That all blew up, however, when Cornelius Williams, who had been a tenant in one of her boardinghouses and suffered the delusion that they were lovers, shot and wounded Hannah at her mansion on Central Park West and shot to death city planner Andrew Green, known as the “Father of Greater New York” for his role in founding Central Park, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and other landmarks. His death was an error: Williams mistook him for one of Hannah’s longtime millionaire lovers John Platt. But the murder, which opens the book, exposed the relationship between Hannah and Platt as well as Hannah’s wealth, leading to tabloid headlines and blackmail accusations that shook New York City’s upper crust. It’s a compelling story, based on what Chase-Riboud says in the acknowledgements is a long-lost trove of documents about Elias. But the novel, especially in its first half, slows the story down with prose that is often clunky and overladen with details, dialogue that sounds more like lecture than conversation, and much repetition. The last part of the book does build momentum, if the reader gets there.
A novel about a real-life madam-turned–real estate magnate stumbles on style.
CURFEW
Cowie, Jayne Berkley (320 pp.) $17.00 paper | March 22, 2022 978-0-593-33678-6
In a near-future United Kingdom, a dysfunctional family is further fractured by “Curfew Laws” that require men to remain off the streets from 7 p.m. to 7 a.m. Sarah Wallace is employed as a “tagger” at a center that locks trackable ankle monitors on all men over the age of 10. Sarah’s ex-husband, Greg Johnson, is soon to be released from prison, where he was sent for a Curfew violation, triggered by an offense committed against Sarah herself. The couple’s daughter, Cass Johnson, is a resentful, bitter teenager who’s furious at her mother, idealizes her father, and has a possessive, hormone-fueled crush on Bertie, a barista. As the book opens, a murdered woman’s body is discovered half buried in the bushes in a park; this
discovery will reveal fault lines in the politically controversial tag system. The book then backs up four weeks before returning to the day the body was found: Sarah tases Paul Townsend, a man who complains about his tag. Cass steals a key from her mother’s office and unlocks her school friend Billy’s tag. Cass’ teacher Helen Taylor stops taking birth-control pills without telling her Cohab partner, Tom Roberts. Three female police investigators quarrel over whether a man could have violated the Curfew Laws to commit the murder and how much of the uncomfortable truth about the tag system should be revealed to a social media–obsessed public. An intriguing murder investigation, credible worldbuilding, clever gender-role dynamics, and a fast-paced narrative are paired with morally compromised characters, a predictable plot, and a didactic and sometimes heavyhanded message about male violence.
A conflict-rich story that demands a safer world for women.
THE TROUBLE WITH HAPPINESS And Other Stories
Ditlevsen, Tove Trans. by Michael Favala Goldman Farrar, Straus and Giroux (224 pp.) $26.00 | April 19, 2022 978-0-3746-0560-5
A brooding collection of stories by the iconic Danish writer. Ditlevsen, who died in 1976, was no stranger to misery: Addicted to drugs and alcohol, she was committed to psychiatric care several times. Many of the characters she depicts in this slender volume of stories could use professional care themselves. In the opening story, a young woman who “had never demonstrated a special talent of any kind” longs for just two things in life: a man and an umbrella. She attains the first, but the second is slower to arrive. “Sometimes she would lie awake next to Egon, or in her bed in the maid’s room in the house where she worked, nursing her peculiar dream of owning an umbrella,” writes Ditlevsen, and when the woman finally does pull the money together to buy an inexpensive bumbershoot, her enraged husband breaks it over his knee. There the story ends, and one can imagine the couple living miserably ever after. In another story, an aging woman despises any reminder that she will one day die yet introduces a prospective daughter-in-law to everyone in her family, the dead by way of photographs, knowing that one day she’ll be reduced to a few memories and a photo on her sewing table. A botched abortion here, an affair there, a child who, though only 7, “already possessed a great deal of formless anxiety,” a father considered nice only because he does not beat his children—these are the people and events that populate Ditlevsen’s unhappy world. About the only promise of redemption comes in the title story, in which a young woman who inhabits a dank corner of a tiny apartment with her parents, her father “completely superfluous in my mother’s world,” works herself through sheer will into a career as a writer. If this small, gloomy piece is a roman à clef, then Ditlevsen deserves every bit of the reader’s sympathy.
Neurasthenic and melancholic but a central work of modern Danish literature.
DON’T SAY WE DIDN’T WARN YOU
Dixon, Ariel Delgado Random House (320 pp.) $27.00 | Feb. 15, 2022 978-0-593-24350-3
An obfuscating narrator reflects on her life through a series of traumatic memories. When we first meet Fawn, the sister of our unnamed narrator, she is wondering how long people have to pretend to be sad following a death: “She
lost and found in paris
couldn’t understand why everyone went on and on after someone died. She was staring out the window, holding her thumb up to the moon. Didn’t they get tired of acting like they were sad? When were you allowed to forget?” This sets the tone for Dixon’s novel: a discomforting look at compounding tragedies through an almost unfeeling lens. The sisters discover (and are responsible for?) dismembered body parts, decapitated animals, arson, and death, all the while constantly, but stealthily, battling against each other. As the narrator cycles between childhood memories of her mother and sister, her time at a residential school for troubled teens, time spent with her estranged father, and her young adult life, we learn more about her but never quite enough to get a firm read. And while Fawn is largely absent from many of the narrator’s recollections, everything always seems to circle back to her. Dixon packs a lot into this novel, and although the reflections on the narrator’s adult life don’t get the care and attention that her childhood and adolescence do, the novel’s weighty center—the relationship between the two sisters—is consistently and devastatingly intriguing.
A coming-of-age rife with destruction.
LOST AND FOUND IN PARIS
Dolan, Lian Morrow/HarperCollins (320 pp.) $27.99 | April 5, 2022 978-0-06-290902-2
A 31-year-old Los Angeles–area woman finds herself caught up in intrigue when the artworks she’s delivering to Paris are stolen. Joan Blakely might be the daughter of an internationally famous artist tragically killed on 9/11 and a supermodel, but she’s nothing like either of her parents, while being exactly like both. Hardworking, focused, beautiful, working at an art museum, and almost 10 years into what she thought was a happy marriage to a photographer, Joan is pretty OK with how her life has turned out. But then her husband drops a bombshell as he’s heading out of town: Not only did he have an affair, he has 5-year-old twin sons who are starting kindergarten and live not five miles away. Joan can either join the big blended family he envisions with his former assistant–cum–baby mama, children, and her, or the marriage is over. Joan doesn’t have to think twice, and the locks to their—really her and her mother’s— house are changed and divorce proceedings started while he’s out of town. The story follows Joan’s efforts to reclaim her life, trying to rediscover the self she lost 10 years previously when her father was killed aboard American Airlines Flight 11 when it hit the North Tower of the World Trade Center. She agrees to personally courier a set of Joan of Arc–related sketches from the museum where she works to Paris so that an interested buyer can take a look at them. One thing leads to another, and the sketches are stolen. An inexplicably lighthearted lark of a treasure hunt develops as Joan follows clues that lead her to various locations of personal importance to her, her father, and her mother as she tries to find the sketches.
A quirky novel that deals with weighty topics and emotions without taking itself too seriously.
WORDS WITH… Weike Wang
The author of Joan Is Okay did not set out to write a pandemic novel
BY HANNAH BAE
Amanda Peterson
There’s a brilliant alchemy that bubbles beneath the surface of Weike Wang’s novels about the sciences. Her 2018 debut, Chemistry, came infused with a mordant wit that made her tale of a Ph.D. student’s breakdown and recovery “at once moving and amusing, never predictable,” according to our review. The novel went on to rack up acclaim, winning the PEN/Hemingway Award and the Whiting Award.
Now, Wang applies those properties to Joan Is Okay (Random House, Jan. 18), turning her gaze to a Manhattan hospital’s intensive care unit. Joan, her Chinese American protagonist, is an outstanding doctor whose workaholic tendencies draw praise from her boss as well as concern from her hospital’s HR department, which forces her to take a break. Feeling banished at her brother’s home in Connecticut, where her mother is visiting from China, Joan finally has time to ponder what drives her so relentlessly in her career and to confront the realities of her fractured family, now living too close for comfort, just before the Covid-19 pandemic hits.
Joan Is Okay is not being sold as a “pandemic novel”— Covid-19 features nowhere in the jacket copy—but the global health crisis truly turns the screws on Joan, a refreshingly “idiosyncratic character” whom Wang brings to life in a style “so wry and piercing,” our review notes.
Kirkus spoke to Wang via Zoom from her home in New York City. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
What was your starting point for this novel? After Chemistry, where I wrote about a protagonist who is having a hard time with her grad school science program, I was interested in writing a doctor protagonist who is an Asian female. I know so many people like this, and I wanted to create a character who is working in STEM and investigate the model minority stereotype through her. I wanted to have a little fun with that stereotype, not ignoring what someone like her would become through this indoctrination and deindividualization, which is so much of medical training. It has nothing to do with this person being Asian, it’s just that all doctors are trained to become a tool [within a larger system].
Was the pandemic always going to be part of the story? No. I had finished the draft and turned it in in February 2020 and thought, I’m done. Covid wasn’t in the book at all. I had known about the pandemic since December 2019 because I have family in China, but it just didn’t cross my mind to include it in the book. Then, as my editor was reading the book in March, as things were starting to get bad here, we realized we had to redo the second part of the novel. The more we thought about it, it didn’t make sense for an ICU doctor to not have any awareness of [the Co-
vid-19 crisis]. Otherwise, I would be writing in a vacuum and pretending that this didn’t exist. I knew I had to weave it in. I was reading so much about ICUs in March anyway, so naturally, in the revision process, I incorporated that. I was resistant at first, but I’m really happy I did it.
How did that affect the pacing? Right around the halfway point of the book, it becomes dreadfully clear to the reader that 2020 is coming. I didn’t want the pandemic to be the story. Joan is working, working, working. I wouldn’t say she’s necessarily scared of the pandemic, because she’s trained for it very well. She starts realizing it’s getting bad [in China], and the headlines progressively get scarier and scarier. It’s occurring to her that a huge wave is coming, and I wanted it to parallel her expulsion from the city because of her hospital’s rules to prevent her overworking. This is the first book that I tried to plot extensively, thinking about outlines. Chemistry is much more internal, and it happens in this nebulous, one-year period in a person’s life. I wrote out an outline mostly of dates because I needed to know the timeline [of the pandemic] really well. In class, I tell my students that a good writer usually has a good control of time. They know when things are going to happen. So I said to myself, in November, in January, what’s going to happen here? The other trick was just trial and error. This story went through so many drafts that I stopped saving them.
So much of what lifts Joan’s voice is her deadpan humor. How did you hone your comedic sense? Humor is a coping mechanism. Humor keeps the door open for readers to come in. I was in science for most of my 20s, and the stereotype of people like us was that we are robotic or we have no feelings, which is wholly not true. I thought, what if I took that idea and made something a little bit comic to point at the absurdity of that idea? Of course, Joan has feelings. She is not this machine that just goes to work. There’s just a funny way that she thinks about the world. She’s endearing. She has an emotional landscape. But to her co-workers, she’s a complete mystery who does everything right. I wanted to play with that a little bit. She’s so laser-focused in her work, she’s oblivious to what’s around her. In that flatness [of how outsiders perceive Joan], I’m inhabiting this character and giving her roundedness in considering what kind of forces would have made her think, act, and talk like this. Because the book deals with identity and prejudice, which are important to Joan as she moves through the novel, it made sense to have the humor and the absurdity of the plot just hammer home the idea of how model minority can she get? It’s so common in immigrant narratives to express this idea that being in America automatically leads to a better life. Instead, you have Joan’s parents move back to China after she and her brother are grown. That’s where they can have a better life in retirement. It seems true to what I’m seeing among my friends and their families. I was trying to challenge this American narrative that life is terrible, but as long as we have each other, it’s going to be OK. I don’t know if that narrative holds water. Sometimes being apart can help the general stability of a family.
Why was it important to show Joan questioning where she belongs? Joan is a small person. She’s short in stature—“just under five feet tall.” She’s not very vocal. As a doctor, she’s always listening to others in order to assess a situation thoroughly. When other people encroach on her, like her overzealous neighbor trying to welcome himself into her life, she’s so taken aback. When Joan is called back to work [from her brother’s home in Connecticut], the pandemic comes for her. She gets sick, and she has to totally quarantine, and she’s thrilled about it. This is her domain—her apartment, her ICU, which expands to take over the entire hospital [because of Covid-19]. Joan is able to rise to the challenge, and her idea of “home” is expanded. Joan’s story is about reclaiming her space.
Hannah Bae is a Korean American writer, journalist, and illustrator and winner of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award. Joan Is Okay was reviewed in the Dec. 15, 2021, issue.
