Book Reviews

BELINDA HuIJuAN tANg

A Map for the Missing

PENGUIN PRESS

After the dedications page of her debut novel, University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop graduate Belinda Huijuan Tang quotes Homer’s The Odyssey, a fitting harbinger for the journey she will take us on. Although A Map for the Missing (Penguin Press) is not the lighthearted summer read you might be looking for right now, it’s one you’re gonna want to read regardless.

A Map for the Missing is a heartbreaking tale that follows Tang Yitian as he searches for his missing father, whom he hasn’t spoken to in many years. When Yitian returns to China to help his mother with the search, he also revisits a past he’s left behind. Jumping through decades, A Map for the Missing dives into the lives of different characters with ease, laying out an engaging portrait of post-Cultural Revolution China through the eyes of those who lived it.

We can trick ourselves into believing that this story is solely about Yitian, a young boy who risks everything to take the gaokao (the National College Entry Exam in mainland China) and grows up to be a professor at an American college. It may actually be about Hanwen, a “sent-down youth” (a term for city kids who were sent to work rural farms) who, despite her drive and intelligence, consistently finds herself playing out the wishes of others, whether it be her husband, her mother or her government.

In fact, maybe this story is just about choice.

Throughout the book, we follow characters who are pigeon-holed due to their class, gender, age and heritage. And while the book mainly takes place in 20th-century China, it rings a dismal bell reminding of a harsh reality in the minds of modern American readers: Sometimes people cannot choose. So it’s up to them to either make the most of the lot they’re given or to disrupt the system to get what they want. Both have consequences that can last a lifetime.

A Map for the Missing does not shy away from difficult topics, important for the subject matter at hand. But Tang somehow finds a way to make even the most heartbreaking parts of this novel beautiful. With her elegant yet simple prose, Tang’s writing is the epitome of bittersweetness. And it results in one of the most poignant endings I’ve ever read, putting a well-fitting cap on a beautifully crafted novel.

I’ve said it before of authors whose debut novels I’ve reviewed, and I’d be remiss not to mention it again: Tang has struck gold with this one. A Map for the Missing is a thoughtful exploration of culture, identity, time and family. And I will be anxiously awaiting the next novel she decides to grace us with.

A Map for the Missing is out on Aug. 9, 2022 via Penguin Press. —Lily DeTaeye

A MAP FOR THE MISSING DOES NOt SHY AWAY FROM DIFFICULt tOPICS, IMPORtANt FOR tHE SUBJECt MAttER At HAND. BUt tANg SOMEHOW FINDS A WAY tO MAKE EVEN tHE MOSt HEARtBREAKINg PARtS OF tHIS NOVEL BEAUtIFUL.

L.A. FELLEMAN

The Length of a Clenched Fist

FINISHING LINE PRESS

Written as a calendar documenting March through October, a single narrator moves through life in lockdown in L.A. Felleman’s The Length of a Clenched Fist (Finishing Line Press). If I hadn’t lived through 2020 I might not understand references like “While Italians Sing Arias From Balconies” (the first poem’s title) or “the square / Marked out in masking tape / Before the checkout lane” (from the poem “Mismanaged”). But, as with most people who are able to read, I was there. Three years into a pandemic, the virus was starting to lose its edge—but some of those memories Felleman documents bring it back, biting and painful.

The epigraph alone is a jarring way to start a poetry collection: “Anyone who has shaved off or cut his beard will be imprisoned until the beard has grown to the length of a clenched fist” (The Bookseller of Kabul, a nonfiction book by Åsne Seierstad). It was unclear to me until well after finishing the book why this quote was used. But in the hangover that followed the book I remember those who protested lockdown in desperation for haircuts. I also thought it a sin to cut hair.

Firmly grounded in 2020, we go from early lockdown to endless routine to dates in the park, but we never resume any semblance of normal. Felleman does not refer to a “new normal”; she never assigns judgment onto others without her narrator accepting judgment first. This is a volume about survival. It is a time capsule of that which we want to forget. While the collection documents the domestic intricacies of life in quarantine, the poems have a universal quality that can apply to other times in life when we are isolated or meditative. We have all been ill, felt lonely and experienced an upheaval of routine. This meditative voice is characteristic of Felleman’s work, and I think I would recognize it anywhere after reading this volume.

The poem that most exemplifies this voice, “How It Ends,” has Felleman distorting format while telling a single death narrative through four perspectives: “In the Cecile B. DeMille version”; “In the Broadway musical adaptation version”; “In the Disney version”; and “In this the Hospice version.” Here, we see one event reflected through different lenses. It is straightforward. It is inward-searching. It confronts our deepest pandemic fears and holds a mirror to each possibility.

There is a lot of sadness in this collection—Felleman discusses painful moments in vignettes, gives them shine and leaves them in their place—but it is not a sad book. Not sanitized, but sometimes dispassionate, the poems are documentarian before they are emotional. Felleman is taking photographs and putting them on display. The reader’s response is their own.

There is craft and exactness in many of these poems, the subtlety of a wallflower. Felleman writes like she’s been studying poetry, putting together the pieces of a puzzle to create the image she’s held in her mind and in this collection it provokes an uncanny sense of being witnessed. This is my own memory on display for me.

“Let it be known that, while I have prayed over this attitude / The requested upgrade / Has yet to materialize.”