LITERARY FICTION by CLAIRE ALLFREE
THE FAMILY CHAO by Lan Samantha Chang (One £16.99, 320 pp)
THERE’S a firm nod to Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov in this sprawling Chinese American drama. Oldest brother Dagou has devoted his adult life to thanklessly helping patriarch Ba at the family restaurant in Haven, Wisconsin, with a view to one day inheriting it. Middle brother Ming has carved out a more lucrative life in New York, while youngest brother James is studying to be a doctor.
Yet Ba remains a powerfully toxic determiner in this immigrant family’s understanding of itself and things come to a head one Christmas, shortly after their mother has abandoned her bullying husband for the local convent.
Various subplots involving a stranger’s life savings and a missing family dog combine as the novel hurtles towards the suspicious death at its core, skewering — with tart humour — cultural myths about assimilation and model migrant families along the way.
Yet Chang, in her admirable refusal to tie things up neatly, allows her characters and story to feel far too untidy and wayward — something a decent edit might have sorted out.
RECITATIF by Toni Morrison (Chatto £9.99, 96 pp)
If YOU baulk at paying £9.99 for Toni Morrison’s only short story, less than 40 pages long, then think again — this smart slippery tale, newly reissued, more than deserves your money and time.
It’s narrated by Twyla, who is eight when she meets Roberta in a children’s home, although unlike many of the children there, both their mothers are still alive: Twyla’s likes to spend the nights ‘dancing’ while Roberta’s is ‘unwell’.
Over the years their lives intersect several more times, and each encounter forces Twyla to recalibrate her assumptions about their friendship and their shared history. More significantly the reader is mired in their own uncertainty: one girl is black and the other white, but Morrison never confirms which. It’s being marketed as highly relevant to our times, which of course it is, but it also serves as a challenge to contemporary novels that prefer to take refuge in racial orthodoxy rather than unsettle it, as Morrison so brilliantly does here. There’s also an excellent and substantial introduction by Zadie Smith.
PURE COLOUR by Sheila Heti (Harvill £16.99, 224 pp)
WHAT to make of the new novel by Sheila Heti, who has made her name as one of the leading proponents of auto fiction (novels that resemble autobiography) thanks to her previous books in which she explored with agonising self-absorption whether or not to have a child?
Pure Colour doesn’t fit neatly into that genre at all; rather it’s a philosophical fable about art, death, faith and the perilous state of the universe that centres on Mira, struggling with the death of her father and her love for another woman, Annie, and which largely dispenses with plot altogether — unless you count the part in which Mira communes with her dead father on a leaf.
Heti is set on defying definition in this evasive, genre-collapsing novel, which rests on long tracts of abstract thought and combines banality with beauty to precarious effect. You will already know by now if this novel is or isn’t for you.