Crazy Rich Asians by Kevin Kwan

She sat in the airless vehicle, which was getting more stifling by the second. She could feel her heart pounding so quickly. She has just bought a three hundred and fifty thousand dollar diamond ring she didn’t much care for, a twenty-eight thousand dollar bracelet she quite liked, and a seven hundred and eighty-four thousand dollar pair of earrings that made her look like Pocahontas. For the first time in weeks, she felt bloody fantastic.

The quote above was on my mind when I saw these dramatic, near-shoulder-grazing earrings in New York City’s trendy SoHo neighborhood earlier this year. These earrings were obviously impractical, like the ones Astrid Leong of Crazy Rich Asians impulsively bought. Where was I going to wear them? How often will I wear them? I don’t really have the lifestyle for jewelry this dramatic. Most of my time is spent at work or at home or at coffee shops.

But it was love at first sight. I stayed away for an hour or two to make sure I really wanted them. I did. Every time I moved away, my insides protested, anxious that someone else would snap them up. I still haven’t worn them outside the house, but whenever I take them out to admire them, I’m still as much in love. Pure joy was a good enough reason to purchase them.

Don’t worry, I didn’t spend anywhere near 784,000 dollars on them. And with that heartwarming love story out of the way, let’s get on with my review of Crazy Rich Asians.

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In Crazy Rich Asians, two young New York University professors, Rachel Chu and Nick Young have been in a romantic relationship for a good while. Nick wants to bring Rachel home to Singapore for his best friend’s wedding. Rachel accepts, hoping Nick will soon propose.

What Nick omits is that he is heir to an illustrious and impossibly wealthy Southeast Asian clan. Upon arrival, poor and oblivious Rachel must deal with the culture shock, money shock, Nick’s unreasonable mother, class snobbery, and bloodthirsty single ladies.

So far, so cliché. A plot like this has the potential to be an entertaining, Austen-esque romp. Trouble is, Nick and Rachel are quite tepid and uninteresting. Their story never lifts above a clichéd romcom, even up to the ending.

Kevin Kwan provided several subplots, mostly a collection of rich people and their silly antics. Some of the dialogue is truly hilarious (and deliciously ditzy!). Overall, though, many of the characters felt like nothing more than caricatures.

(Don’t take only my word for characterization though. A friend whose diplomat family worked in Southeast Asia and a Singaporean Instagram pal said that the characters are pretty true to life.)

A notable exception is Astrid Leong’s subplot. Astrid is Nick’s glamorous and elegant socialite cousin. Her story succeeded in conveying genuine depth and feeling. Not necessarily a rebel, she does break away from certain conventions of her exclusive milieu. She married a middle-class man forging his own career instead of old money/a high-profile politician/a royal offspring/an emerging billionaire.

But if there’s anything money can’t buy, it’s a happy marriage. Astrid’s plot feels sincere because its conflict is believable. I actually wished for Crazy Rich Asians to center its story on Astrid. Plus, she is written as a chic lady with impeccable taste and a discerning eye for style, rather than throwing money at designer labels. Come on, you have to admit she sounds a lot more fun than an everycouple.

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I was skeptical of the Crazy Rich Asians series (it’s a trilogy) when it started getting hype. The plot sounded like a typical romcom and it probably gained traction because the novel detailed a socioeconomic milieu Western readers didn’t know about. Still, I’m not immune to hype. And wasn’t it my duty as a Southeast Asian to read a novel about Southeast Asians that convinced Hollywood to feature a majority Asian cast for a film in twenty-five years?

While I didn’t find it particularly interesting, I don’t discourage anyone from reading Crazy Rich Asians. It’s fun and glossy. It may not offer anything new or particularly thoughtful, but every bibliophile needs a glossy read once in a while. It would be a good book to jumpstart your reading if you’ve been in a slump. It would be great for vacation too.

When all is said and done, however, my primary purpose in writing this review is to show off those gorgeous earrings and talk about them.

Have any of you read Crazy Rich Asians? What do you think?

The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy

Oh look! A novel I had planned to review last year because 2017 marked its 20^th birthday. What? It’s January 2018 now? Whoops. Oh well.

The God of Small Things wasn’t the best fiction I read in 2017 (That minor honor goes to Shelter by Jung Yun, which I have yet to review), but I couldn’t get it out of my head months after finishing it.

The God of Small Things focuses on a trope I have always loved and Roy built a family saga around it. The trope in question? A noble house in decay.

Roy chose a fascinating period in the decline of an esteemed house. The God of Small Things wasn’t written in chronological order, but as our mind figures out the story’s linear timeline, we realize that the story enters at a point where the house is already in decay and losing prestige. The current generation is simultaneously in denial and attempting to stave away the inevitable.

So we turn the pages awaiting a climax, after which the house loses all standing, good name, and even its income.

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The God of Small Things starts with church rites. Sophie Mol, the nine-year-old half-British and half-Indian daughter of family heir Chacko, is dead. We know that Ammu, Chacko’s sister, and her twin children Rahel and Esthra were somehow seen as responsible for Sophie’s death. They were ostracized and pointed at during the funeral.

We are then launched into stories of various family members: the current clan and the older generation. Their backgrounds and most revealing anecdotes are told, creating fully realized characters. No one in this sprawling family is likable. In fact, the whole pack seriously needed copious therapy. All I see, page after page, is delusion, hypocrisy, petty drama, incompetence, and recklessness.

But then, is it a surprise when the man who built the family name was odious? A violent husband and an abusive father, but toadying towards the colonialists, his family cannot escape his clutches long after his death.

Decay and suffocation are themes that infuse The God of Small Things. When the timeline starts, Kerala, where the novel is set, was verdant and beautiful. When twin daughter Rahel returned as an adult woman, her hometown has become a tourist trap where water no longer supports life. The fish are dead and belly-up. The house falls, the land polluted. There is decay and there is inertia, the sense that everything stays the same, yet rot inevitably infests. There are fathers with great hopes for their sons but sons grow up to be menial men with mediocre jobs and class stays unchanged.

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The prose of The God of Small Things is famously divisive. It took me a while to finally take the plunge and read as I feared the novel required complete focus, with a dense writing style and a tangled family tree. Nah. Everything’s easy to follow.

The poetic flourishes of The God of Small Things reads childlike and excited to my eyes, rather than esoteric. Makes sense. While we are given an omnipresent view of nearly all the family members, a sizable chunk of the novel’s voice is heard from the twins Rahel and Esthra – children when the story begins, devastated adults at the novel’s end.

Overall, I took pleasure in Roy’s writing style, but the prose can and does cross the realm into being irritatingly overwritten. The God of Small Things is deeply descriptive, lyrical, and lush. Roy turned her pen and her senses to describe absolutely everything. The season’s overripe mangoes got a page’s worth of writing. It does get tiresome and The God of Small Things isn’t even a long novel. My edition is around 340 pages, but 40 pages of the book’s excessive detail could have been easily cut to produce a stronger novel: beautifully written and focused.

(Because dear god, sometimes I thought: right, can we get on with the actual story? Please?)

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Despite my quibbles with the writing style, The God of Small Things is a rich novel, full of themes to unpack and beautiful imagery.

I thought the climax and mystery surrounding Sophie Mol’s death were predictable. I guessed what happened not even a quarter into reading the book. No matter – I don’t think Roy was ever invested in the mystery either: the themes, characters, and overall story were what was emphasized.

Here’s a question: why hasn’t the BBC commissioned a miniseries on The God of Small Things? I mean, it’s got the big themes they love: class and colonialism. That alone should have gotten the agents talking.

Stay With Me by Ayobami Adebayo

Image courtesy of Goodreads

The inclusion of Stay with Me in the 2017 Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction shortlist heightened my expectations for a highbrow literary novel. Upon finishing the novel, however, I was slightly in dismay.

I’m sure many bibliophiles have had the experience of finishing a book and thinking ‘Well, that was enjoyable. Don’t think it was particularly accomplished though.’ If you are anything like me, the thought would be followed by some guilt. No one wants to be a snob. You want to be discerning, but most definitely not a snob. Let’s hope this is a discerning review.

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We begin Stay with Me with Yejide and Akin, who have been married a few years. They are a loving and happy Nigerian couple with a modern relationship dynamic. Both work and contribute to the family finances. Their early interactions were marked by respect and reasonable discussions. #relationshipgoals basically, as the kiddos say these days.

That is, until the fateful day Yejide opened her front door to family relatives and a young woman claiming to be Akin’s second wife.

Polygamy was always something Yejide and Akin rejected. Both came from polygamous families and, Yejide especially, suffered from it. Akin’s family were beginning to be impatient for a baby, however, and Yejide had no choice but deal with the new woman’s arrival into her household.

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This is where most synopses of Stay with Me end, which was why I expected the novel to be a slow-paced domestic drama dealing with the repercussions of polygamy while providing insights on family dynamics and the larger Nigerian culture. But Stay with Me isn’t that type of family drama. This is a very action-based novel; plot twists are abundant here. I think most reviewers stop describing the plot at the second wife’s arrival to avoid spoiling the story for potential readers. I respect the discretion and have done the same.

The twists and turns in Stay with Me are relentless. They really are too much for any couple to bear, no matter how loving or happy. If your life is a constant struggle against challenges, without hope, sooner or later you’ll get exhausted and even want to give up.

I’m reasonably sure Adebayo plotted these dramatic turns and reveals as catalysts to show Yejide and Akin’s humanity. The near soap-opera plotting should be secondary to Yejide and Akin as characters. For Stay with Me to work, its two elements of excessive drama and authentic humanity needed to balance each other out – unfortunately, the elements never quite cohere together.

Sure, there were moments of sincerity in Stay with Me. A near violent argument between Yejide and Akin seemed to be happening too early in the novel, until you realize that when trust is lost and words have been treated like weapons, a loving relationship degenerates in no time.

If Stay with Me had more scenes highlighting emotional devastation and relationship cracks while paring down the gothic drama, I would love the novel so much more. My favorite line came from a rare moment of contemplation, when Akin reflected on unforeseen consequences:

[A]ll the mess of love and life that only shows up as you go along.

Stay with Me isn’t winning any prizes for poetic prose, but that disarmingly simple line is so honest and true. Life is a cocktail of variables we have no control over. All we can do is do the best we can and be the best person we can, no matter how much things hurt sometimes.

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If I were to say Stay with Me is a great novel to take on a red eye flight, is that backhanded praise?

In no way do I advocate reading only esoteric writing. My favorite reads are books that beautifully balance the accessible and the meaty. Alas, while I am sure that was the author’s intention – Stay with Me ended up lacking enough meat to carry the raucous surface.

Despite all my caveats, I await Adebayo’s next fiction endeavor with interest. Adobayo is young, not even 30, and Stay with Me is her debut. I think she set out to write my favorite type of novel, where the readable and the thoughtful blend seamlessly together, but fell a bit short. But Stay with Me displays potential and I am optimistic she has the chops to perfect her craft.

The Painted Veil by W. Somerset Maugham (Review and Book/Movie Comparison)

Read and reviewed as part of my Classics Club Challenge

Hahaha, the last book review on this blog was uploaded in early July. I hope I’m not too rusty.

(Although the fact that I finished The Painted Veil in early July also does not bode well).

Having read this novel nearly four months ago means that I have forgotten the finer details. Overall, however, I really liked it, in spite of my inability to create neat conclusions of its message and/or themes. Yet, in a way, the lack of absolute coherence in The Painted Veil added to its charm. Especially as the novel tackles some topics that, in real life, defies easy categorization, such as: the irrationality of romantic feeling and the influence on religion on one’s character.

Kitty, a pretty and frivolous English debutante, missed her prospects in the marriage market. In a panic, she accepts the proposal of Walter Fane, a dull bacteriologist due to sail to Crown Colony Hong Kong for his post. They quickly marry and settle in the colony, where Kitty meets Charlie Townsend, a handsome, suave, and married British government official. Kitty and Charlie fall into an affair and The Painted Veil enters at the point when Walter discovers the infidelity.

At first, Kitty and Charlie dismiss Walter. He is Charlie’s inferior in the job ladder. He is far too besotted with Kitty. Instead, Walter pushed an ultimatum to Kitty: he will either file for divorce and humiliate her, or she must follow him to the cholera-infested Chinese interior, risking death. Charlie shows his true colors: craven and unsympathetic. Kitty has no option but follow Walter to the mainland.

The Painted Veil, at least the novel version, is the story of Kitty’s introspection and self-improvement. It is not a love story, which the 2006 film adaptation starring Edward Norton and Naomi Watts might lead you to believe.

While I liked the film version for what it was, I much preferred the novel. The novel’s outlook on life is far less simple. Love, and the blossoming of romantic love, is never simple. In the film, Kitty sees Walter’s virtues: his devotion to patients, his kindness, his morals, learns the error of her ways and falls in love with him. Kitty’s book counterpart, however, never falls in love with her husband despite seeing and acknowledging his qualities. She grows to admire him, but eros does not strike.

I appreciated the book’s touch. The film, in a way, pushed a simplistic message: “women, be less foolish and frivolous and just fall in love with the nice guy, will ya?” Never mind the fact that one must wonder at Walter’s supposed kindness when he insisted on bringing Kitty to a region that may spell death.

(I inwardly applauded “That’s my girl!” when book-Kitty exclaimed, “It’s not my fault you were an ass!” at Walter’s misguided punishment)

Kitty’s journey towards self-betterment, almost a coming of age, really, is believable because of the missteps she makes along the way. No one can ever say that Kitty attained perfection. Despite maturing throughout The Painted Veil, she falls short again and again. But she does learn after every debacle. She becomes stronger, wiser. Yet even stronger and wiser, Kitty can still make dreadful decisions – with a particular error close to the novel’s end. But Kitty learns from that too.

At the start of this review, I wrote that I couldn’t eke out the message of The Painted Veil. But perhaps it is simply this: that we make horrible mistakes in life, then we learn and get stronger. We slip up again. But we survive.

Maybe it’s trite. But that’s the point of fiction, no? To make clichéd bumper sticker phrases fresh and true all over again.

The Town in Bloom by Dodie Smith

Being a newly minted university graduate with a B.A. in English, I’ve stomached enough literary theory and incomprehensible postmodern fiction for the foreseeable future. During these lazy months where my future career is still a glaring question mark, I’ve lapsed back to my old reading modus operandi: charming English novels.

The book I just read was The Town in Bloom by Dodie Smith. I found it hiding in a shelf at Bell’s Books in Palo Alto, CA a few days before my graduation. Imagine my surprise! I had not known that Dodie Smith wrote books other than I Capture the Castle and The 101 Dalmatians.

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The Town in Bloom is divided into three segments. In the first section, three elderly ladies named Mouse, Molly, and Lillian sit down to have lunch and reminisce on their forty-year old friendship. Section two is a long flashback and constitutes the bulk of the novel’s plot. The final section is an epilogue.

The plot of the novel is simple enough. Section two of The Town in Bloom details the exploits of eighteen-year old Mouse, a country girl who aspired to a successful stage career in 1920s London. Along the way, she cultivated close friendships with chorus girls Molly and Lillian, met the wealthy, enigmatic Zelle, and involved herself within the affairs of the Crossway Theatre. The Town in Bloom is a coming-of-age novel, and delved into Mouse’s first foray into love.

Mouse is the linchpin of The Town in Bloom. If you like her, you’d love The Town in Bloom. Yet Mouse is polarizing. One may find her irresistibly charming, others may find her repugnant. I tried to like her, only to be left ambivalent in the end.

In her first big scene, Mouse crashed an audition at the Crossway Theatre: she bluffed the stage door keeper into letting her inside to weasel an audition out of stage manager Brice Marton. Rebuffed but undeterred, Mouse got ahold of the theatre’s actor-manager Rex Crossway and willfully persuaded him to give her a chance.

The scene is Mouse’s character-establishing moment, yet the impression she makes is entirely to your taste. I’m sure Mouse will strike some readers as bold and resourceful, but I found her brashness and rudeness shocking. After Rex Crossway gave her the go ahead to give an impromptu performance,

“I [Mouse] rushed through the pass door and up to the stage. Brice Marton was just coming into the wings. He stared at me [Mouse] and gave a disgusted snort, then said, “Someone will have to lend you a script.”

The girl who had come off the stage with him offered hers. I thanked her politely but said I shouldn’t need it. “And I shan’t need you, either,” I said to Brice Marton, not at all politely, and sailed out to the front of the stage.”

I found Mouse’s comment to Marton unnecessary as he was simply doing his job in keeping the auditions going. That short remark soured my impression of her.

Although my response to Mouse is not overwhelmingly positive, I’m first to admit that she is a wonderfully fleshed-out character. She is headstrong, confident, and resourceful; it is astonishing how she is able to jump back with ease after each misstep and catastrophe. At times however, some of Mouse’s behavior was so questionable I began labeling her as dishonest. I also wondered if her inhuman ability to bounce back from troubles is tied to her greatest personal failing: she never learns from her mistakes. Mouse’s choices at the end of The Town in Bloom’s second section only magnified those suspicions.

Despite all the attention on Mouse, the novel’s supporting characters were also well constructed. Mouse’s friends Molly, Lillian, and Zelle were given good subplots of their own. But Rex Crossway charmed me the most. He may not have magnetism but he melted my heart with his generosity and kindness. As the plot advanced and he and Mouse plunge into an affair, his character became more unsavory but Rex never lost his charm. It’s a point of debate whether the much older Rex was taking advantage of Mouse. Yet Smith made a point of Mouse’s assertiveness in the affair. Mouse may be many things, but a victim she was not.

Technically speaking, The Town in Bloom is not an action-packed novel. Yet I never found the pace slow. The narrative zips along and The Town in Bloom was a pretty quick read. Some scenes are just lovely! A tiff between Molly and her fiancé close to the end of section two will have you laughing. Dodie Smith was a playwright before she became a novelist and it shows. Her light touch reminded me of comic scenes at the theatre.

The Town in Bloom is not without its charms. In fact, if I liked Mouse more I would have found this novel exceedingly lovely.