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A review by brice_mo
Masquerade by Mike Fu
1.5
Thanks to NetGalley and Tin House for the ARC!
Mike Fu’s Masquerade might be marketed as a surreal exploration of the narratives we believe about ourselves, but don’t let the pitch fool you—this is a book that seems to think repetition is reflection, redundancy is recursion, and recognition is re-evaluation.
It’s an exhausting and fruitless read, particularly because it is so insistent on telling you it has a lot on its mind without ever offering any evidence to support such a claim.
The protagonist, Meadow, has settled into that post-grad school malaise where his life is uneventful. He’s just gotten out of yet another relationship, and his best friend prophetically says, “You fall easily into this kind of story. Invent a new one and start over.” Then, she promptly vanishes, and Meadow finds a book written by someone who shares his name. Sounds exciting, no?
There’s definitely potential here for parsing out the difference between self-narration and self-mythology, and that seems to be what Fu is reaching for. Unfortunately, it remains beyond his reach at every opportunity, starting with his characters.
The voices throughout the book are interchangeable, often doing little more than explicitly commenting on their inability to write their own narrative. Before you think that’s a very meta and heady approach, please know that it’s not an approach—it’s just something that happens over and over with no development. Fu treats the book’s premise—write a new story—as its conclusion, and it reads like a thought exercise without a thought behind it.
Similarly, the Matryoshka doll approach to storytelling Fu employs here feels like it could add a lot to a deconstruction of narrative. We revisit the same scenes repeatedly, and it seems like the intention is to craft a kaleidoscopic, multilayered story where we dive deeper into the impact of specific moments. What we actually get is closer to an extended montage, endlessly recapping scenes without development and undermining any of the surrealism suggested by the marketing copy with the most wooden literalism imaginable. Most of these scenes are wine-soaked dinner parties, but we don’t even get to enjoy the listless vibe of a hangout. The book just feels like a novella-shaped premise stretched beyond recognition into a novel.
Ultimately, I don’t think these things would matter much if the prose were good. I’ve read many uneventful books that still feel rewarding because each sentence stands as a work of art. Sadly, Masquerade lets readers down here too, offering a frustrating pastiche of clichés—ChatGPT-core, if you will.
It’s a harsh critique, but there were so many moments that felt like an algorithm’s notion of “literary” writing—radical anonymity when it’s clear the author is capable of more. Consider, for example, the following sentences:
“But none of this has come to pass. Meadow has no idea yet about the sordid tale that’s on the cusp of unfolding.”
So much of the prose is uncomfortably and artificially elevated like this, and it’s unfortunate because the authorial voice periodically relaxes into something far more distinctive. I fully believe that Mike Fu could write a book that accomplishes more if it were less preoccupied with identifying its own ambition.
In the end, Masquerade is a frustrating disappointment, a surprise from Tin House. While I sympathize with its command to “write a new story,” I encourage interested parties to skip this book and instead read a new story.
Mike Fu’s Masquerade might be marketed as a surreal exploration of the narratives we believe about ourselves, but don’t let the pitch fool you—this is a book that seems to think repetition is reflection, redundancy is recursion, and recognition is re-evaluation.
It’s an exhausting and fruitless read, particularly because it is so insistent on telling you it has a lot on its mind without ever offering any evidence to support such a claim.
The protagonist, Meadow, has settled into that post-grad school malaise where his life is uneventful. He’s just gotten out of yet another relationship, and his best friend prophetically says, “You fall easily into this kind of story. Invent a new one and start over.” Then, she promptly vanishes, and Meadow finds a book written by someone who shares his name. Sounds exciting, no?
There’s definitely potential here for parsing out the difference between self-narration and self-mythology, and that seems to be what Fu is reaching for. Unfortunately, it remains beyond his reach at every opportunity, starting with his characters.
The voices throughout the book are interchangeable, often doing little more than explicitly commenting on their inability to write their own narrative. Before you think that’s a very meta and heady approach, please know that it’s not an approach—it’s just something that happens over and over with no development. Fu treats the book’s premise—write a new story—as its conclusion, and it reads like a thought exercise without a thought behind it.
Similarly, the Matryoshka doll approach to storytelling Fu employs here feels like it could add a lot to a deconstruction of narrative. We revisit the same scenes repeatedly, and it seems like the intention is to craft a kaleidoscopic, multilayered story where we dive deeper into the impact of specific moments. What we actually get is closer to an extended montage, endlessly recapping scenes without development and undermining any of the surrealism suggested by the marketing copy with the most wooden literalism imaginable. Most of these scenes are wine-soaked dinner parties, but we don’t even get to enjoy the listless vibe of a hangout. The book just feels like a novella-shaped premise stretched beyond recognition into a novel.
Ultimately, I don’t think these things would matter much if the prose were good. I’ve read many uneventful books that still feel rewarding because each sentence stands as a work of art. Sadly, Masquerade lets readers down here too, offering a frustrating pastiche of clichés—ChatGPT-core, if you will.
It’s a harsh critique, but there were so many moments that felt like an algorithm’s notion of “literary” writing—radical anonymity when it’s clear the author is capable of more. Consider, for example, the following sentences:
“But none of this has come to pass. Meadow has no idea yet about the sordid tale that’s on the cusp of unfolding.”
So much of the prose is uncomfortably and artificially elevated like this, and it’s unfortunate because the authorial voice periodically relaxes into something far more distinctive. I fully believe that Mike Fu could write a book that accomplishes more if it were less preoccupied with identifying its own ambition.
In the end, Masquerade is a frustrating disappointment, a surprise from Tin House. While I sympathize with its command to “write a new story,” I encourage interested parties to skip this book and instead read a new story.