LITERARY FICTION
INTERIOR CHINATOWN by Charles Yu (Europa Editions £12.99, 288 pp)
INTERIOR CHINATOWN
by Charles Yu (Europa Editions £12.99, 288 pp)
From Paul Beatty’s The Sellout to Brandon Taylor’s Real Life, some of the most talked-about novels from the U.S. in recent years have been male coming-of-age narratives shaped by experiences of racism.
Styled as a typewritten television script, this zany spin on the genre follows Willis Wu, a Chinese-American actor who, tired of playing ‘Background Oriental Male’, longs to be cast as ‘Kung Fu Guy’ — the first of many sweet-and-sour gags here about the nature of internalised prejudice.
As he finds himself on the set of a cop show in Chinatown, he endures dumb quips about takeaways, and wonders why he keeps hearing a gong crash between takes — although we’re never sure if it’s all happening inside his head (another smart, ultimately pretty bleak joke).
If Yu is clearly tickled by the pop cultural clichés he’s sending up, his comedy has a serious side, laying bare the psychic harm that stereotyping inflicts.
Share this article
SHELTER IN PLACE by David Leavitt (Bloomsbury £13.99, 224 pp)
SHELTER IN PLACE
by David Leavitt (Bloomsbury £13.99, 224 pp)
Amid the fallout from this week’s U.S. presidential election, here’s an amusing satire set in New York in the aftermath of the last vote, among a well-heeled arts-and-media crowd mourning Donald Trump’s victory in 2016.
Horrified by the result, Eva, a former magazine editor who didn’t actually bother to vote, jets off to Venice, where she buys an expensive flat on a whim.
Her husband, Bruce, a wealth management adviser, uses her absence to steal time alone with his secretary (not for the reason you might think) and, still more treacherously, break bread with a Trump-supporting neighbour.
The story is leisurely, even meandering, but the joy lies in how gently Leavitt lets air out of the catty micro-climates his characters inhabit, from publishing to interior design.
I almost regretted the long-buried trauma introduced at the end, as if the author suddenly doubted the novel’s talky ambience offered enough to relish.
XSTABETH by David Keenan (White Rabbit £14.99, 179 pp)
XSTABETH
by David Keenan (White Rabbit £14.99, 179 pp)
Scottish writer Keenan followed his riotous debut, This Is Memorial Device, about a fictional post-punk band in the 1980s, with 2019’s For The Good Times, a violent, no-holds-barred comedy about the IRA.
I reckon he’s one of the most exciting new writers around. But, if you haven’t read him before, it probably doesn’t make sense to begin with his mystical and mystifying new book, which is — how can I put this? — absolutely bananas.
Dealing with art, sex, the supernatural and, um, golf, it’s narrated by a 19-year-old Russian girl whose father, a folk singer, records an album that creepily turns sentient — unless it’s a hoax by a predatory friend.
Keenan’s metafictional gameplaying and occult interests were grace notes of his earlier books; here, they all but run the show.
His author’s note, perhaps tongue-in-cheek, says he wrote the book in ‘a state of possession’ — in other words, even he can’t explain it.
