An intriguing, high-concept effort cut from the same generational cloth as Tumblr and Wattpad.
Tan’s debut novel is both a love letter to fandom and a sustained meditation on alienation, artificiality, and the sinister nature of capitalism.
In this novel of interconnected narratives that mimics the shifting planes of a Rubik's Cube, characters appear and reappear in stories that pastiche various genres, from anime and video games to sci-fi thrillers and fan fiction. The cycle begins with Elena Rubik, a young 20-something who is struck and killed by a car, leaving behind a ghostly electronic footprint. From there, we meet a succession of guarded misfits: a piano teacher haunted by a seven-note motif and her shy student; an isolated voice-over artist and the former model enamored with his voice (the model’s employer, Ampersand, offers a dark satire of the chain Urban Outfitters). Tan winks at her readers, sprinkling mentions of Leonardo DiCaprio and dream totems à la Inception here, aviator glasses–wearing assassins straight out of The Matrix there. It becomes clear that we’re caught—somewhere—in a potentially bottomless, self-referential piece of fan fiction, of the type characters in the novel would post on a forum called Luxury Replicants. One of the most inventive of these experiments is a narrative treatment for the faux anime series Pikkoro and the Multipurpose Octopus, in which a floating octopus cares for a precocious child. Together, they must defeat HarvestTime, a shadowy corporate entity. This, it turns out, is a reference to the novel’s capitalist bugaboo, Seed, a tech company with recurring viral marketing campaigns and obliquely sinister intentions—a throughline reminiscent of The Matrix via Infinite Jest. Fans of matryoshka-doll novels like Cloud Atlas and A Visit from the Goon Squad may be expecting a baseline narrative around which alternate worlds and realities shift, but Tan provides her readers with no such luxury. Like many of the sci-fi films Tan references, each narrative threatens to collapse, revealing its own artificiality, in a seemingly endless hall of mirrors. And while Tan’s imagination is inventive and capacious, her characters can exhibit a kind of fairy-tale flatness, too. This, however, might be part of the game. As one character remarks, “Once the machine is in motion...it doesn’t have to obey us. It’s almost like there’s…[something] that wills the objects, that determines how things will behave when they’re triggered.” Tan is skilled enough to keep readers guessing about what that next mysterious movement might be.
An intriguing, high-concept effort cut from the same generational cloth as Tumblr and Wattpad.Pub Date: April 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-944700-57-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Unnamed Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018
A newcomer to watch: fresh, funny, and tough.
Seven stories, including a couple of prizewinners, from an exuberantly talented young Thai-American writer.
In the poignant title story, a young man accompanies his mother to Kok Lukmak, the last in the chain of Andaman Islands—where the two can behave like “farangs,” or foreigners, for once. It’s his last summer before college, her last before losing her eyesight. As he adjusts to his unsentimental mother’s acceptance of her fate, they make tentative steps toward the future. “Farangs,” included in Best New American Voices 2005 (p. 711), is about a flirtation between a Thai teenager who keeps a pet pig named Clint Eastwood and an American girl who wanders around in a bikini. His mother, who runs a motel after having been deserted by the boy’s American father, warns him about “bonking” one of the guests. “Draft Day” concerns a relieved but guilty young man whose father has bribed him out of the draft, and in “Don’t Let Me Die in This Place,” a bitter grandfather has moved from the States to Bangkok to live with his son, his Thai daughter-in-law, and two grandchildren. The grandfather’s grudging adjustment to the move and to his loss of autonomy (from a stroke) is accelerated by a visit to a carnival, where he urges the whole family into a game of bumper cars. The longest story, “Cockfighter,” is an astonishing coming-of-ager about feisty Ladda, 15, who watches as her father, once the best cockfighter in town, loses his status, money, and dignity to Little Jui, 16, a meth addict whose father is the local crime boss. Even Ladda is in danger, as Little Jui’s bodyguards try to abduct her. Her mother tells Ladda a family secret about her father’s failure of courage in fighting Big Jui to save his own sister’s honor. By the time Little Jui has had her father beaten and his ear cut off, Ladda has begun to realize how she must fend for herself.
A newcomer to watch: fresh, funny, and tough.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-8021-1788-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2004
Old-fashioned short fiction: honest, probing and moving.
One of America’s great novelists (Lost Memory of Skin, 2011, etc.) also writes excellent stories, as his sixth collection reminds readers.
Don’t expect atmospheric mood poems or avant-garde stylistic games in these dozen tales. Banks is a traditionalist, interested in narrative and character development; his simple, flexible prose doesn’t call attention to itself as it serves those aims. The intricate, not necessarily permanent bonds of family are a central concern. The bleak, stoic “Former Marine” depicts an aging father driven to extremes because he’s too proud to admit to his adult sons that he can no longer take care of himself. In the heartbreaking title story, the death of a beloved dog signals the final rupture in a family already rent by divorce. Fraught marriages in all their variety are unsparingly scrutinized in “Christmas Party,” Big Dog” and “The Outer Banks." But as the collection moves along, interactions with strangers begin to occupy center stage. The protagonist of “The Invisible Parrot” transcends the anxieties of his hard-pressed life through an impromptu act of generosity to a junkie. A man waiting in an airport bar is the uneasy recipient of confidences about “Searching for Veronica” from a woman whose truthfulness and motives he begins to suspect, until he flees since “the only safe response is to quarantine yourself.” Lurking menace that erupts into violence features in many Banks novels, and here, it provides jarring climaxes to two otherwise solid stories, “Blue” and “The Green Door.” Yet Banks quietly conveys compassion for even the darkest of his characters. Many of them (like their author) are older, at a point in life where options narrow and the future is uncomfortably close at hand—which is why widowed Isabel’s fearless shucking of her confining past is so exhilarating in “SnowBirds,” albeit counterbalanced by her friend Jane’s bleak acceptance of her own limited prospects.
Old-fashioned short fiction: honest, probing and moving.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-06-185765-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Aug. 31, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2013
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