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sam_bizar_wilcox 's review for:
A Quitter's Paradise
by Elysha Chang
This book is an odd choice for the type of afternoon library book clubs its clearly been marketed and designed to be. It's been published by the star of Sex and the City, her eponymous imprint SJP Books; this, much like Reese's "Book Club Picks" and those ubiquitous "O" stickers from Oprah Winfrey, feels like a symptom of a modern kind of parasocial need to read and consume and know what celebrities like. It is also, I think, not the best fit for this novel. Sure, it deals with the intergenerational family trauma of the main character, Eleanor, her relationship with her now-dead mother, and weaves in threads about her identity as a Taiwanese American, about grief and recovery, and about struggling in her twenties.
Yet, it feels like the idea of a celebrity as a literary taste-maker comes with the assumption that this debut will be ... splashy. This isn't a really a page-turner, although a lot does happen. Instead, Chang's novel is noteworthy for its clear prose and subjective depth. It's a book that's firmly mounted in Eleanor's psyche, and, unsurprisingly, it was off-putting for some readers. There's kind of a slow, descriptive quality to her prose, Chang often collecting and surveying the scene as if to inventory the novel's progress. Yet, as she surveys, the items don't seem to piece together. Things don't all logically connect. Items are left in a room as disparate. The dead don't speak.
The style, I think, absolutely works. In fact, this is a very successful book: it's a book about revelations that do not come. True, Chang can be heavy-handed in her delivery (characters flatly reveal thematic truths about Eleanor being avoidant or putting off her life), but the crux is not Eleanor's coming-of-age, but her relationship with her family. And Eleanor cannot know what impelled her father to leave. Eleanor cannot know who her mother was. She looks through her mother's belongings to try to understand her but her mother is, still, unknowable. Where audiences might have felt betrayed...let down by a narrative that doesn't relent, this is not Chang's fault, but that of the publisher. With its cute, splotchy pastel cover, A Quitter's Paradise is far too meandering and ambivalent for mainstream tastes that its imprint and promoters seem to think.
This book is an odd choice for the public persona of SJP. It reminds me more of something that Lenny might have published, back when that was a thing. I hope that Chang can find her audience.
Yet, it feels like the idea of a celebrity as a literary taste-maker comes with the assumption that this debut will be ... splashy. This isn't a really a page-turner, although a lot does happen. Instead, Chang's novel is noteworthy for its clear prose and subjective depth. It's a book that's firmly mounted in Eleanor's psyche, and, unsurprisingly, it was off-putting for some readers. There's kind of a slow, descriptive quality to her prose, Chang often collecting and surveying the scene as if to inventory the novel's progress. Yet, as she surveys, the items don't seem to piece together. Things don't all logically connect. Items are left in a room as disparate. The dead don't speak.
The style, I think, absolutely works. In fact, this is a very successful book: it's a book about revelations that do not come. True, Chang can be heavy-handed in her delivery (characters flatly reveal thematic truths about Eleanor being avoidant or putting off her life), but the crux is not Eleanor's coming-of-age, but her relationship with her family. And Eleanor cannot know what impelled her father to leave. Eleanor cannot know who her mother was. She looks through her mother's belongings to try to understand her but her mother is, still, unknowable. Where audiences might have felt betrayed...let down by a narrative that doesn't relent, this is not Chang's fault, but that of the publisher. With its cute, splotchy pastel cover, A Quitter's Paradise is far too meandering and ambivalent for mainstream tastes that its imprint and promoters seem to think.
This book is an odd choice for the public persona of SJP. It reminds me more of something that Lenny might have published, back when that was a thing. I hope that Chang can find her audience.