Chen’s stories are both subtle and rich, moving and wry, and in their poignancy, they seem boundless.
An astonishing collection of stories about life in contemporary China by a Chinese American writer.
Chen, a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, has an eye for the wry, poignant detail in her fiction debut: Elderly men who meet in the park to play chess bring their pet birds along, hanging the birdcages from tree branches while they play. Most of the stories are set in China. In one, a young girl who works in a flower shop becomes dangerously interested in one of her customers. In another, an older man in a remote village tries to build a robot and, later, an airplane. Whether her characters are women or men, young or old, Chen displays a remarkable ability to inhabit their minds. She is gentle and understanding with her characters so that their choices, desires, and regrets open up, petal-like, in story after story. Often, in the background or off to the side, a hint of violence will make itself known: A young man’s twin sister is arrested and beaten by the police; a woman’s abusive ex-boyfriend appears without warning, and she remembers his old penchant for harming animals. A young man borrows money to invest in the stock market, and as his hopes begin to plummet, he learns the details of his father’s traumatic past. Again and again, Chen reveals herself to be a writer of extraordinary subtlety. Details accrue one by one, and as each story reaches its inevitable conclusion, a sense emerges that things could have gone no other way. Still, there’s nothing precious or overly neat here. Chen’s stories speak to both the granular mundanities of her characters’ lives and to the larger cultural, historical, and economic spheres that they inhabit. She is a tremendous talent.
Chen’s stories are both subtle and rich, moving and wry, and in their poignancy, they seem boundless.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-358-27255-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Mariner Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 4, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2021
SEEN & HEARD
The range and virtuosity of these stories make this Mosley’s most adventurous and, maybe, best book.
A grandmaster of the hard-boiled crime genre shifts gears to spin bittersweet and, at times, bizarre tales about bruised, sensitive souls in love and trouble.
In one of the 17 stories that make up this collection, a supporting character says: “People are so afraid of dying that they don’t even live the little bit of life they have.” She casually drops this gnomic observation as a way of breaking down a lead character’s resistance to smoking a cigarette. But her aphorism could apply to almost all the eponymous awkward Black men examined with dry wit and deep empathy by the versatile and prolific Mosley, who takes one of his occasional departures from detective fiction to illuminate the many ways Black men confound society’s expectations and even perplex themselves. There is, for instance, Rufus Coombs, the mailroom messenger in “Pet Fly,” who connects more easily with household pests than he does with the women who work in his building. Or Albert Roundhouse, of “Almost Alyce,” who loses the love of his life and falls into a welter of alcohol, vagrancy, and, ultimately, enlightenment. Perhaps most alienated of all is Michael Trey in “Between Storms,” who locks himself in his New York City apartment after being traumatized by a major storm and finds himself taken by the outside world as a prophet—not of doom, but, maybe, peace? Not all these awkward types are hapless or benign: The short, shy surgeon in “Cut, Cut, Cut” turns out to be something like a mad scientist out of H.G. Wells while “Showdown on the Hudson” is a saga about an authentic Black cowboy from Texas who’s not exactly a perfect fit for New York City but is soon compelled to do the right thing, Western-style. The tough-minded and tenderly observant Mosley style remains constant throughout these stories even as they display varied approaches from the gothic to the surreal.
The range and virtuosity of these stories make this Mosley’s most adventurous and, maybe, best book.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-8021-4956-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
Oddly exquisite.
Part essay, part story, part diatribe, part diary—even part dictionary—this book defies definition.
The narrators of this collection—a loose compilation of short works cut from Gen Z angst and internet gobbledygook—share more than a milieu. In “Love Story,” the fairytales of our youth are supplanted, “Once upon a time” replaced with “He was giving knight errant, organ-meat eater, Byronic hero....She was giving damsel in distress, pill-popper pixie dream girl.” Later on, “Halloween Forever” showcases another form of affection, that between an internet rabbit-hole denizen and “her” FBI agent, the one the meme says must be watching her. “Internet Girl” catalogs the protagonist’s descent into the digital, from Neopets to naked chat rooms. Managing to reference 2 Girls 1 Cup and 9/11 in a single sentence, the narrator continues apace, jumping from cultural touchstone to cultural touchstone without stopping for breath. The collection does take the occasional detour across a more traditional narrative arc, as in “Cancel Me,” in which the main character is locked out of a party. Standing in the rain with two dimwitted stand-ins for male mediocrity, she contemplates cancel culture, absolution, and, not for the last time, edgelords. The first-person narrators of these stories, only one of whom is named, share a hodgepodge of leftist beliefs not quite coherent enough to serve as evidence in the debate over whether they are in fact the same person. This book is billed as fiction, a truth that may recurrently shock the reader. The fictionality here is another layer to be parsed, along with thick films of irony and sincerity that demand to be scrubbed through by hand. If you text with a single index finger, steer clear. The girls who inhabit this world are only occasionally wise, but always clever.
Oddly exquisite.Pub Date: May 14, 2024
ISBN: 9780593656532
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: March 23, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2024
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