This novel is about `everything'
Memory Piece Lisa Ko Riverhead
A blurb proclaimed Lisa Ko's second novel, Memory Piece, to be a book about “everything.”
This is a novel that explores, among other things: chosen versus blood family, artistry, work, the internet, capitalism, activism, communal living, class, elitism, exploitation, surveillance, lesbianism, bisexuality, memory, time, and the particular thrills and rigours of being a young person in New York City.
The best element of Memory Piece is the three women at the centre of the story. Ko — whose previous novel The Leavers (2017) traced a young man's search for his mother, an undocumented immigrant in New York — draws characters with such deftness they feel wholly alive.
Details add up over time to create dazzling dimensionality. Giselle Chin, Jackie Ong and Ellen Ng meet as preteens in the 1980s in the New York area and become, if not best friends, lifelong familiars, drifting into and out of each other's orbits. Their career paths are as varied as their personalities: Giselle is a shape-shifting, rigour-loving performance artist; Jackie a brilliant, insular coder; Ellen a strong-willed activist.
Memory Piece is divided into three sections of roughly equal length — one each from Giselle's, Jackie's and Ellen's point of view — plus a fourth section composed of micro-chapters with shifting perspectives.
Giselle's section, the first, is strongest. It unfurls elegantly with a hypnotic immediacy, starting with her early teen years. We track Giselle's maturation from a girl hemmed in by familial expectations and Jersey suburbia to a woman endlessly reinventing herself. She becomes an amateur collagist, then a daring performance artist. Jackie's segment, the second, drags at the outset. It's the late '90s and she's working in tech for a Postmates-like company, hating it, and spending most of her spare time working on Lene, a service she lovingly created that helps people publish their web diaries. Things pick up when she reconnects with Ellen and meets her motley crew of East Village squatter pals, a resourceful bunch in the process of occupying an abandoned building.
Ellen rejects convention in favour of a radical reimagining of how to live. She yanks us into the future. We find her, in the third section, scraping by in a dystopian America. Imagine present-day inequities stretched to hair-raising conclusions. What if the gig economy was the only option left for workers, except the megarich? What if surveillance and censorship were ultra-magnified?
There's much to admire in this novel. The originality. The vastness. The main characters' depth and breadth. The reflections about who or what gives a life meaning. It's refreshing.