A sexy, unflinching portrait of a woman revolting against the life she makes for herself.
In this literary novel, an ambitious but conflicted woman navigates the world of fashion while contending with her destructive attraction to sinister men.
When Amy Wong was still in high school, she lost her virginity to a middle-aged shoe salesman in exchange for a pair of $1,250 boots. The event foretold her career as an emerging designer in New York’s competitive fashion industry as well as a love life filled with older, predatory men. At Parsons, her White classmates mutter about affirmative action while the resident design mogul, Jeff Jones, exoticizes Amy’s Chinese heritage. That doesn’t keep her from sleeping with him, and, in fact, she agrees to marry him shortly after graduation. Everyone assumes she just did it to get ahead, but it isn’t long before she has ceased to be an up-and-coming designer and gets sidelined into being a wife and a mother to Jeff’s difficult child. Or, at least, she hopes he’s Jeff’s: “Maybe Jeff sensed it, somehow, or maybe he fell into his old patterns. He started to look elsewhere. He came home reeking of sex and Coco Mademoiselle. Fashion is a small industry. Everyone knew, which made me feel all the more helpless and ashamed.” Because of a prenup, Amy is forced to find a job after the marriage fails. Forget about making her mark on the industry; now, she just has to find a way to survive in it. Unfortunately for her, continued difficulties with her son, Alex, as well as further complications with the men in her life create even more drama. As she tries to navigate a world rife with subtle racism and flagrant sexism, Amy must also contend with her sexual appetites, her guilty motherhood, and the self-loathing that has always sabotaged her depthless creativity.
The book reads with the ease of a beach novel. Chiu’s prose rolls like fabric and pricks like a pin, piercing the politeness that covers up the deeper ugliness of nearly every social interaction. Here, Jeff attempts to correct Amy’s vision of him, just as she decides she might want to love him: “ ‘And that night,’ he says. ‘That wasn’t really me.’ I start to laugh. ‘You mean racist?’ ‘I was coked-up, high.’ He rolls his eyes. ‘So you’re not really racist,’ I say. ‘Only the coked-up you is racist?’ ‘Something like that, yes,’ he smirks.” Amy is a memorably intricate character, empathetic even as she is impulsive and sometimes thoughtless. The author deftly evokes the intensity of Amy’s desires—both physical and aesthetic—drawing readers along for every bad idea and moment of rebellion. The fashion world is depicted with luminous specificity—and, as a metaphorical field, it is perfectly selected—but Amy’s story will resonate for those operating in any industry in which the complex layers of race, gender, access, and propriety can complicate a woman’s every action. It’s a coming-of-age story that never stops, revealing how the decisions of youth reverberate and reoccur throughout the decades of a life.
A sexy, unflinching portrait of a woman revolting against the life she makes for herself.Pub Date: May 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-73377-775-9
Page Count: 278
Publisher: Santa Fe Writers Project
Review Posted Online: July 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.
A falsely accused Black man goes into hiding in this masterful novella by Wright (1908-1960), finally published in full.
Written in 1941 and '42, between Wright’s classics Native Son and Black Boy, this short novel concerns Fred Daniels, a modest laborer who’s arrested by police officers and bullied into signing a false confession that he killed the residents of a house near where he was working. In a brief unsupervised moment, he escapes through a manhole and goes into hiding in a sewer. A series of allegorical, surrealistic set pieces ensues as Fred explores the nether reaches of a church, a real estate firm, and a jewelry store. Each stop is an opportunity for Wright to explore themes of hope, greed, and exploitation; the real estate firm, Wright notes, “collected hundreds of thousands of dollars in rent from poor colored folks.” But Fred’s deepening existential crisis and growing distance from society keep the scenes from feeling like potted commentaries. As he wallpapers his underground warren with cash, mocking and invalidating the currency, he registers a surrealistic but engrossing protest against divisive social norms. The novel, rejected by Wright’s publisher, has only appeared as a substantially truncated short story until now, without the opening setup and with a different ending. Wright's take on racial injustice seems to have unsettled his publisher: A note reveals that an editor found reading about Fred’s treatment by the police “unbearable.” That may explain why Wright, in an essay included here, says its focus on race is “rather muted,” emphasizing broader existential themes. Regardless, as an afterword by Wright’s grandson Malcolm attests, the story now serves as an allegory both of Wright (he moved to France, an “exile beyond the reach of Jim Crow and American bigotry”) and American life. Today, it resonates deeply as a story about race and the struggle to envision a different, better world.
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.Pub Date: April 20, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-59853-676-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Library of America
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2021
BOOK TO SCREEN
An emotionally acute study of manliness.
Scenes from the life of a well-off but emotionally damaged man.
Szalay’s sixth novel is a study of István, who as a 15-year-old in Hungary is lured into a sexual relationship with a married neighbor; when he has a confrontation with the woman’s husband, the man falls down the stairs and dies. Add in stints in a juvenile facility and as a soldier in Iraq, and István enters his 20s almost completely stunted emotionally. (Saying much besides “Okay” sometimes seems utterly beyond him.) Fueled by id, libido, and street drugs, he seems destined to be a casualty until, while working as a bouncer at a London strip club, he helps rescue the owner of a security firm who’s been assaulted; soon, he’s hired as the driver for a tycoon and his wife, with whom he begins an affair. István is a fascinating character in a kind of negative sense—he’s intriguing for all the ways he fails to confront his trauma, all the missed opportunities to find deeper connections. To that end, Szalay’s prose is emotionally bare, deliberately clipped and declarative, evoking István’s unwillingness (or incapacity) to look inside himself; he occasionally consults with a therapist, but a relentless passivity keeps him from opening up much. His capacity to fail upwards eventually catches up with him, and the novel becomes a more standard story about betrayal and inheritances, but it also turns on small but meaningful moments of heroism that suggest a deeper character than somebody who, as someone suggests, “exemplif[ies] a primitive form of masculinity.” István’s relentlessly stony approach to existence grates at times—there are a few too many “okay”s in the dialogue—but Szalay’s distanced approach has its payoffs. Being closed off, like István, doesn’t close off the world, and at times has tragic consequences.
An emotionally acute study of manliness.Pub Date: April 1, 2025
ISBN: 9781982122799
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: March 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2025
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