Soft Science, by Franny Choi

 I'm pretty sure that I was introduced to Franny Choi when Anjuli Raza Kolb quoted her poem "The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On", and I looked it up and read it over and over and over, and saw this  collection at the bookstore a few days later and of course bought it. 

 

  These are smart, tough, and deeply unsettling poems. They bring together the human/cyborg distinction, and stereotypes about Asian women, and dissociation as a response to violence and awfulness, in really remarkable ways. Extremely powerful stuff.

Interior, Chinatown, by Charles Yu

We've been living in an age of irony for years now, it seems, but more recently, at least in literary fiction, there's been a wave of really dense satire about race. I know people have written, and are writing, about this, and I need to read that stuff, but I will confess that I often struggle with the novels. They are, of course, intentionally inhospitable, so it's not surprising, but my discomfort is not that I feel called out so much as that it can often feel like telling rather than showing. Everything is exaggerated, when it feels like nuance would be more illuminating. But sometimes, in the most successful versions of this kind of thing, the exaggeration is so extreme that it goes all the way through and back to nuance again, forcing you to excavate the specificity within the outsize shapes. That, I think, is how Interior, Chinatown works. 

It took me awhile to get into it, because you have to negotiate the utter artificiality of the conceit, the intense layers of irony and parody. The novel is a script/story about Willis Wu, Generic Asian Man, who yearns to become Kung Fu guy — but also to break free of cliche roles. The commitment to the form means that the story can be frustratingly rote, emotionless, and of course, that's the point, as is the disorientation of not knowing whether this is a movie or "real life." 

But once you get into it, it's absolutely brilliant, and quite lyrical. I'm realizing that I've read more than a few texts this year by Asian American authors that are grappling with the complexities of Asian American identity in the racial eco-system of the US — not out of a concerted effort on my part, more by happenstance, but doubtless inspired by the reckoning emerging as a response to the increasingly blatant outbursts of anti-Asian violence. This one is more specifically engaged in the question of representation in movies and tv shows, and how that shapes identity, and it examines these issues in really powerful ways.

Summer, by Ali Smith

 I can't really write about Summer without writing about the rest of the quartet, though actually, I might have liked it more if I hadn't read the others. I've complained enough on this blog (though maybe not recently) about how much I despise the "multiple unrelated stories that get woven together" form (or better to say, how picky I am about it; I actually love it when it's done well, but usually I find it trite). So you'll understand why I say that I might have enjoyed this book more if I didn't know that the characters had appeared in previous books. The fact that I didn't completely remember their stories from earlier didn't actually help (or maybe it did!). 

The thing is: I loved Autumn. I read it 2 years ago and thought it was just gorgeous, and a wonderful meditation on different forms of love, and so clever in the way it subtly referenced extremely recent events. I was already a huge Ali Smith fan, and I was so excited to read the rest of the quartet, but decided I'd wait until all of them were out, and read each in its season. I read Winter in March, and liked it not quite as much as Autumn, but appreciated its slightly surreal quality, and its loving meditation on Shakespeare, and the way it really did capture a feeling of winter, just as the previous book had gotten something right about autumn. But then I kind of hated Spring. I hated the way it used magical realism to talk about some of the more appalling aspects of the political present, and I even started to find Smith's style somewhat grating. 

I disliked it so much that I put off reading Summer for as long as possible, so that I wouldn't still be annoyed when I read it. And so I didn't actually start it until summer was over, in late October, and then things got veryvery busy, so I only just finished it. And it was fine. I was surprised by how heart-rending it was to read about characters experiencing lockdown and the beginnings of the pandemic (too soon?). It did, at moments, evoke a very specific kind of summer feeling (but I am still in the thrall of Garden by the Sea which is just the perfect summer book). I was mostly charmed by Smith's style, though I definitely think it will be a good long while before I pick up another book of hers. But mostly, I found the novel largely forgettable.