Chieng’s deadpan playfulness works for and against him: it draws the reader in at first, but then its brittleness gets in...
Tired of overstuffed family sagas? How about a family saga lite? That’s what Chieng, spoofing the genre, offers in his debut.
Tongue-in-cheek, Chieng starts with a family tree, dated 2002, of the Lums, a Chinese-American clan in California. This is a tree with many fallen limbs. Our quasi-protagonist, 23 year-old Louis, lists six dead Lums in his lifetime—ah, those freak accidents! The latest death is that of his mother, in a head-on collision, and father Sonny is hell-bent on a revenge killing of the other driver, an exhausted hospital resident asleep at the wheel. It’s Louis’s mission to stop his father’s project; his other mission is to ease his grandmother Esther’s anxiety by tracking down his reclusive Uncle Bo. With these two frail storylines, Chieng, skipping around chronologically, passes over key moments of the standard immigrant saga: the Lums’ arrival in the US, say, or their later move from San Francisco’s Chinatown to the white suburbs of Orange County. He does show the racial consciousness of the Lums after Pearl Harbor, when the family tries but fails to dissuade Louis’s stubborn grandfather Melvin from enlisting in the white man’s war. But by 2002, the Lums are completely assimilated. They speak with a sitcom snap, Louis worships at Wal-Mart and Target, Sonny is crazy for rap music. Skewering racial stereotyping, Chieng makes Hersey Collins, that sleepy hospital resident, a black man unacquainted with rap music. The avenging Sonny lets him off the hook when Hersey accepts a rap record in a denouement a little too cute. As for Uncle Bo, he’d found his family overwhelming and escaped to Hong Kong. His mother still adores him, but unconditional love can be crushing: that’s the lesson Bo has for Louis when uncle and nephew finally meet.
Chieng’s deadpan playfulness works for and against him: it draws the reader in at first, but then its brittleness gets in the way of full identification with his characters. Still, on the whole, a promising debut.Pub Date: April 4, 2005
ISBN: 1-58234-533-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2005
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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