THE MUSTACHIOED WOMAN OF SHANGHAI

An author disappears in this psychological novel set in contemporary China.

Isham is missing. After publishing naked pictures of his girlfriend/translator on the internet and then beating her up in a Shanghai cafe, the writer has dropped out of view. That’s the story according to Marguerite, the mostly deaf Afghan American rug weaver with a glass bathtub and a prominent mustache. Marguerite attempts to reassemble the tale, for herself and a coterie of admirers. Years ago, author and English teacher Isham began a relationship with Luna, a Chinese woman fluent in English, who also happened to have a mustache. But sex was too painful for Luna for them to consummate the act, which led the pair to a dysfunctional, obsessive, on-again, off-again relationship. All the while, Isham was living with his main girlfriend, Bonnie. When Kitty, a third woman—who also had a mustache—entered the mix, the situation became truly volatile. Unable to share him, Luna and Kitty would eventually spiral into destructive behaviors that would end Isham’s life as he knew it. The erotic thriller has an ambitious, Faulkner-ian structure, at times alternating between the largely summarized adventures of the three lovers and Marguerite’s Scheherazade-like pausing the action to analyze them. The book investigates some intriguing territory, including polyamory and dating practices in China. But the protagonist is an unsalvageable misogynist and fetishist, and Cook’s prose replicates those tendencies. Luna is described as having “a primitively alluring face, a rudely attractive face, a compactly sexual face” while Isham and an American friend are portrayed thusly: “Both were atheists, down-to-earth in temperament, straight talkers, with a fondness for craft ales and voluptuous Asian bodies.” (In addition, the phrase benevolent rape appears at one point as a possible solution to Luna’s problem.) Cook’s past publications have flirted with these same transgressions, and it is possible that he is purposefully leaning into them here for the sake of making readers uncomfortable. But when all the exploitative material is stripped away, there simply isn’t much story left.

A sometimes-engrossing but often self-indulgent tale about polyamory gone awry.