I don't know why I was so surprised to find that Celeste Ng's first novel, Everything I Never Told You, features a mixed Asian-American family. I truly didn't expect it, despite the fact that I knew Ng was Asian-American.
And as I read later in interviews conducted with Ng after her second book, Little Fires Everywhere, was released, she had concerns about being pigeonholed as an “Asian writer” after the massive success of her first book. So perhaps it's particularly odd that it never occurred to me that Ng being Asian-American makes her an “Asian-American writer” who writes about themes relevant to Asian-Americans. It may be because I grew up in Honolulu, where Asians are the majority–perhaps I often forget that Asians are a minority in this country. It may be because my own family is mixed Asian-American. It just never occurred to me that being Asian-American is a way to be pigeon-holed.
But of course it is. And I confess that I've been struggling with this in my own writing. Should I have an Asian character? Is that too “on-the-nose?” Should there be a racial theme in this story? Why? Why not?
It's complicated, and I like what Ng has done with these ideas, how she has handled these problems. They are problems, whether her readers realize it or not. Is she writing about alienation, isolation, parenting, marriage, teen angst, using the framework of race in twentieth century America? Or is race just that–race–in her book?
Everything I Never Told You is a gripping read, un-put-down-able. I tried to dislike it. It has a third person omniscient POV that at first strikes one as old-fashioned (like an English children's story, or a very old novel), with its rather bossy authorial voice. It seemed weird that one minute I was thinking thoughts inside the son's head, and the next I was watching his expression. I also kept trying to figure out why the novel was so gripping. Everything is explained–EVERYTHING. There is very little suspense, because Ng explains every single reason for everything. In some places, the reasoning is really trite, almost a little simplistic. There's no suspense. We aren't the ones figuring out the mystery–this narrator will explain it all, as it happens.
And yet I kept reaching for the book over the course of several days.
Another point worth noting is that this is a genre I normally really dislike. I'm not a fan of books about “love and loss.”
But I think I will be picking up Ng's second book in the near future.
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