Kings of kong

A detail-rich tour of the private jets, exquisite dinners & many, many parties of the world’s newest billionaire set

Crazy Rich Asians

By Kevin Kwan Doubleday Canada 416 pp; $29.95

Three things happened on the way to this book review.

First, a deal was sealed for Frank Sinatra’s famous old New York duplex, a Chinese tech tycoon swooping up the pad on 72nd Street — a “glittering grotto in the sky,” as Andy Warhol once referred to it — as a prezzie for his daughter. Cultural revolution, indeed.

Secondly, news arose that Christie’s auction house is set to open the first “global advisory for buyers of vineyard estates” — in Hong Kong! Chinese oligarchs, having already developed a taste for the finest French wines — one whose collective power has pushed prices of certain vintages up to record levels — have seemingly moved on from quaffing to buying up entire vineyards in Burgundy and beyond. Santé!

Thirdly, and perhaps most dramapickled, a Game of Thrones- ish battle began when media baron Rupert Murdoch kick-started a divorce from his Wendi of 14 years — a woman who’d essentially invented the modern archetype of “Asian Trophy Wife.” And so it goes on, the arc of Deng Wen Di, daughter of a factory director in Jiangsu province, in Eastern China, who’d gone on to morph into the Tiger Mom almighty of Fifth Avenue, jet-set staple and networker

sine qua non.

Hitting the zeitgeist axis, with the precision of an Audermars Piguet Royal Oak watch (the classic wristwear of any proverbial tycoon with his own power-boat)? That’d be

Crazy Rich Asians, by Kevin Kwan. Both vivisection and valentine, it is the summer’s most sophisticated romp. Other novels might be more “lyrical,” more “unflinching,” more whatever the “It” adjective in reviewspeak happens to be, but for full-stop fun, stop right here.

Centred on the wedding of the year/century between two progeny of the beyond-rich, Colin Khoo and Arimantha Lee, the book shuttles between Singapore, Hong Kong and America, land of the of the so-called ABCs (“American-born Chinese”). Stakes are high; the social cues, Whartonian. And with weddings long having been a lens for social peering — from Shakespearean comedies to

The Philadelphia Story to that flick with Hugh Grant — there is the reopenings of old wounds, casual existentialism, both intergenerational swordplay and clashes of culture, a canvas for snobbery and the meaningof-it-all-ness. And treachery! And parties. So many, many parties.

Other novels might be more ‘lyrical,’ but for full-stop fun, stop right here

Everything about the book is big, including its Franzenesque length. The level of wealth among these Asian squillionaires is such that even

Downton Abbey begins to shrivel in the mind, and look more like Down

ton Arriviste. The homes, the couture, the everything — no wonder a chapter of the book was excerpted in the June Vogue (a coup, indeed), and no wonder regular Vogue contributor Plum Sykes, an anthropologist of the wealthy herself with books such as Bergdorf Blondes, has bequeathed one of the blurbs. “A Chinese Dallas,” is among the things she calls it — apt, in that in the same way the original

Dallas, on TV, was a peephole into Reagan’s America (“pre-global economy,” as it’s been argued), Crazy Rich

Asians is an outrageous peephole into a world we mostly know from the pages of The Economist. One that is almost entirely new. (China, as Kwan points out, didn’t have a single billionaire a decade ago, while today there are 122 of ’ em from there on the Forbes list)

But Kwan doesn’t do pedantic. And since he has a gift for silliness, and more importantly knows of what he writes — the first-time novelist comes from one of Singapore’s old families — the book is less Economist than it is a hybrid of Hello, Elle Decor and, oh, Bon Appetit. Because Singapore, where the bulk of the action occurs, is one of the foodie-est places on Earth — a nation of Bourdains, really — there are near-dissertations galore on delicacies such as goren pisang, i.e. deep-fried banana fritters. And because the novel is swimming in detail, we get tableaus such as the one in which a grande dame holds a party specifically in honour of the blooming of her tan hua flowers, these being the kind that bloom only once a decade — and only at night! Naturally, there is a scene on a private Boeing 737-700 — one with its own yoga studio on-board.

Reading Crazy Rich Asians I had the flash of another book — 1993’s A

Suitable Boy, Vikram Seth’s amazing, sweeping, panoramic novel about India. And not just because this novel, like that one, has a two-page family tree, showing the branches of all the inter-connected families (believe me, you need it — I returned to it over and over while keeping track of all the characters that Kwan has given us). Though A Suitable Boy is a more classically literary concoction, and this one is definitely more pop and like that most cliched Chinese meal — you might be hungry again right after reading it — Crazy

Rich Asians does succeed, indeed, as a snapshot of a culture and a time. And surely Rupert will be taking it with him to the beach this summer.

FOTOLIA