When it comes right down to it, I think some novelists just have the juice.
Three novels into what I’m hoping is a long career, I’m ready to declare that Weike Wang has the juice. With her new book, “Rental House,” coming after her 2017 debut “Chemistry,” and 2022’s “Joan Is Okay,” Wang is now three for three on delivering sharp, funny, sneakily emotional stories that, if you are like me, you will read compulsively until completion.
“Rental House” centers on married couple Keru and Nate, who meet as students at Yale, and as the novel opens, are now successful adults living in New York City, Keru a consultant with partnership on the near horizon, and Nate a research professor (specialty: fruit flies) at one of the city’s universities.
It’s the latter stages of COVID and Keru and Nate are planning a vacation at a coastal New England cottage where their respective parents will visit them and their 4-year-old sheepdog, Mantou, one pair at a time.
The setup may seem banal, but the way Wang deepens the dynamic by braiding in the backstory of both Nate and Keru and their parents increases the tension as we understand that some kind of clash is inevitable. Keru’s parents are Chinese immigrants with limited English and exacting attitudes toward their only daughter. Nate’s are rural red staters who don’t quite understand the motives of their professor son, or why he refuses to stay connected to his brother who seems to bounce from problem to problem.
I will not describe the action beyond the setup because the novel’s pleasure is in watching these dynamics unfold in ways that inevitably deepen our understanding of all the characters, not just Nate and Keru, but the parents as well.
Wang’s first two books centered on first-person female main characters, a Ph.D. student (“Chemistry”) and a busy ICU doctor (“Joan Is Okay”), giving us close contact with the main characters through the use of narrative voice.
“Rental House” ups the challenge by employing a close third-person narration that moves between Keru and Nate, often complicating something we’ve just seen or been told by viewing it through the other character’s perception.
In Wang’s first two novels, the main characters are at war between their duties — both perceived and real — and their desires. Those desires are perhaps as fundamental as they get: to be happy, to feel as though this is the life you should be living. Wang is particularly acute in the way she maps the dynamic of first-generation Americans who feel beholden to the parents who sacrificed so much for their opportunities.
In “Rental House,” Keru is struggling with the same desires, but this time things are even more complicated by knowing that there is a partner struggling with the same things alongside her. The result is a sweet and sometimes sad portrait of a marriage of two people who love, but don’t always understand each other.
Like her earlier books, “Rental House” is also driven by Wang’s devastating deadpan wit. It is truly a marvel and must be read in context to be appreciated. This wit is the energy core that delivers the juice.
After the first rental house experience, there is a second one, some years later when the tensions established the first time around are brought to a head and the book becomes something of a page-turner as it steams toward the conclusion.
Of course, none of these emotional entanglements, husbands and wives, parents and children, brother and brother will ever be entirely solved.
There is only the ongoing process of living as best you can.
John Warner is the author of “Why They Can’t Write: Killing the Five-Paragraph Essay and Other Necessities.”
Book recommendations from the Biblioracle
John Warner tells you what to read based on the last five books you’ve read.
1. “Same as It Ever Was” by Claire Lombardo
2. “Hum” by Helen Phillips
3. “Forgotten on Sunday” by Valerie Perrin
4. “You Are Here” by David Nicholls
5. “Piglet” by Lottie Hazell
— Laura V., Libertyville
For Laura, I’m recommending one of my favorites of the year, “Margo’s Got Money Troubles” by Rufi Thorpe.
1. “Romney: A Reckoning” by McKay Coppins
2. “Chasing Hope: A Reporter’s Life” by Nicholas Kristof
3. “Revenge of the Tipping Point” by Malcolm Gladwell
4. “Ghosts of Honolulu” by Mark Harmon and Leon Carroll Jr.
5. “I Love Learning; I Hate School” by Susan D. Blum
— Raymond C., Elmhurst
Biography, history and idea-driven non-fiction dominate. I’m going with the idea-driven and recommending a book that I return to periodically for the quality of its insights, “Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World” by David Epstein.
1. “Slow Horses” by Mick Herron
2. “The Hunter” by Tana French
3. “Erasure” by Percival Everett
4. “The Yiddish Policemen’s Union” by Michael Chabon
5. “People of the Book” by Geraldine Brooks
— Christine C., Skokie
These are all books I know and are Biblioracle approved, so all I have to do is dip into the well of other Biblioracle approved books and we’ll have a match: “Homegoing” by Yaa Gyasi.
Get a reading from the Biblioracle
Send a list of the last five books you’ve read and your hometown to biblioracle@gmail.com.