Ng conjures up dystopian future
Celeste Ng takes us into a dystopian future where people are judged on their embrace of American “customs and traditions” and people of Asian descent are viewed with suspicion, sometimes even hate.
Noah Gardner is a 12-year-old boy living alone with his father, Ethan, three years after his mother, Margaret Miu, has left, her whereabouts unknown.
After a period of civil violence and economic hardship known as the “crisis,” marked by widespread looting and cities set ablaze, a law known as PACT — Preserving American Customs and Traditions — requires people to adhere to strict rules of behavior.
Noah’s father works stacking a dwindling supply of books at the university library as more books are banned. Nicknamed Bird by his mother, the boy has promised to forget her, but cannot get her out of his mind after receiving a mysterious drawing of cats that recalls the fanciful stories she used to tell him.
He doesn’t realize until later that the occasional protests he sees outside have been inspired by a collection of his mother’s poems as people speak out against growing reports of children spirited away from parents judged insufficiently American, then placed with new families.
In this new order, librarians are heroes, running an informal network of information about the missing children, the details scribbled onto scraps of paper and pressed between the pages of the few remaining books.
And just as books have long been banned in the U.S., so have children long been taken from their families, as an older Choctaw woman looking for her own grandchild reminds
Margaret in the book.
“You think this is something new?” the Indigenous woman asks Margaret, referring to the Indian boarding schools where boys and girls were “civilized.” — Anita Snow, Associated Press
Don’t be fooled by the fact that this slim
new volume from Elizabeth McCracken has the words “a novel” on the cover. It’s a memoir. The reason it’s not referred to as such is clear from the dedication page — a handwritten note from McCracken to her mom in 1993 promising that she’ll never appear as a character in her work.
Semantics aside, “The Hero of This Book” is simple and lovely. McCracken’s easy prose is a joy to read. The narrator — she uses the first person and readers can interchange the word narrator and author if they like — is in London 10 months after her mother’s death to revisit places they loved together while reflecting on their relationship. “Once somebody is dead, the world reveals all the things they might have enjoyed if they weren’t,” writes McCracken.
From August 2019, the narrative jumps around to past moments that reveal
the mother’s values and the bond she shared with her daughter. Cleaning out the kitchen in 2002, as the narrator prepares to introduce her future husband to her parents (“I was trying to make a house he could visit without being appalled”):
“I brandished the cheese. ‘Three years out of date!’ I said to my mother. …
‘No,’ she explained. ‘I just bought that.’ ‘1999!’ I said. ‘Look!’ ‘Printer’s error,’ said my mother, who generally used her considerable powers of stubbornness for good.”
Beyond honoring a mother, McCracken does something else remarkable in these pages. She writes about writing. Despite her narrator’s admonition early on, nuggets of advice pop up throughout like bubbles: “Why do I write? To try to get human beings on a page without the use of vivisection or preservatives or a spiritualist’s props, to make them seem lively still.”
McCracken does that with this book, processing her own grief and honoring her mother’s life, even if the subject — her hero — would assuredly have scoffed at the idea.