Rampant scene headings, one of which gives us our book’s title.īut it’s in the action where things are different. If you read Charles Yu's Interior Chinatown (and I strongly suggest you do), you’ll find that it kind of looks like a script. That they aren't made for casual reading. Against the backdrop of this experiential normalcy, Yu tells us about ourselves with his haunting depictions of the immigrant experience, familial relationships, and the abiding desire to break from the pressures of conformity and live an authentic life.There's surely a lesson to be learned about being too honest in a job interview, but it also reveals something I have heard many times about reading scripts. The details meticulously crafted, render a universe that feels complete to the touch. We are compelled by the socio-racial commentary, and we’re delighted and amused by the form and setting.
All told, Yu is most successful when both the artistic and political conceits act as an entryway to his presentation of the human condition.
In doing so, Yu’s writing adeptly straddles the border between storytelling and Asian-American Studies seminar. Despite the mind-bending premise, Yu takes special care to present his themes of Asian-American identity straightforwardly within the novel’s narrative. What does it all mean? And in this case, Yu’s novel answers in a refreshingly accessible way. And Yu does allegory as well as anybody, taking an outrageous concept and using it to communicate the dire mundanity and the resonant emotional struggles of the human experience. It’s all of those things, but maybe mostly, it’s allegory. It’s an identity story couched in a kind of a fantasy setting, a kind of a George Saundersesque alternate reality. It’s satire in its political and social commentary.
It’s family drama in the centrality of family relationships. Charles Yu specializes in ferreting out that peculiar angle, that spark of the unexpected, that re-illumination of an otherwise age-old narrative, and then taking that fantastical story element and spreading it horizontally until it coats the entirety of his writing’s universe.
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