Today, however, for a variety of reasons, whether a general climate of political correctness, the fear of sounding offensive or naive, the pervasiveness of confessional memoir culture or some other explanation entirely, “literary” authors tend to confine themselves to the narrow backyards of their own personal and ethnic experiences. Early in the novel, the narrator, Kelly Thorndike, an overeducated white widower in his 30s still reeling from the simultaneous deaths of his Chinese wife, Wendy, and their 3-year-old daughter, Meimei, remembers feeling that he wanted “to be denatured, detached, to luxuriate in my cocoon and emerge an utterly different butterfly.” This is rich material, a slight but not at all implausible exaggeration of existing surgical technologies, cultural trends and existential discourses in the early 21st century and a brilliant conceit that practically demands to be parsed in an age when conversations about gender dysphoria have already gone mainstream, standards of beauty have grown increasingly mixed, and aesthetic surgical procedures have become affordable and commonplace. In an otherwise impeccably written and researched book, this amounts to an egregious failure — the complete evasion of the task of imagining and describing the fallout from Robin, the community and indeed the culture at large — just when he has labored so brilliantly to write himself into the position of saying something new, incisive and wholly original on not just American, but also global race, class and social dynamics in an era when labels and designations of all sorts are becoming voluntary and customizable. What we get, instead of a powerful social commentary, are reams of pages of background on the sinophilic Kelly’s highly subjective interest in Chinese language and poetry (and it must be said Row demonstrates an impressive amount of learning here); an encyclopedic amount of detail on the financial health and backroom maneuverings of NPR affiliate-level public radio culture; and an independently absorbing but ultimately unimportant backstory on the childhood friendship between Kelly and Martin and a third friend named Alan, who overdosed on heroin at age 19.
Comment on 'Your Face in Mine,’ by Jess Row
By Thomas Chatterton Williams, San Francisco Chronicle: Entertainment
Fri, 08/22/2014 - 5:55pm
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