E-book Evaluate: Rachel Khong’s new novel ‘Actual Individuals’ explores race, class and cultural id
In 2017 Rachel Khong wrote a slender, darkly comedian novel, “Goodbye, Vitamin,” that picked up quite a lot of accolades and was optioned for a movie. Now she has adopted up her debut effort with a sweeping, multigenerational saga that’s twice as lengthy and really critical.
“Actual Individuals” — the title alone suggests its weighty topic — wrestles with points of sophistication, race and the genetic element of illness. Although largely a piece of social realism, it has a contact of science fiction, with characters experiencing “blips” in existence, when time itself appears to get caught.
The novel is narrated by three members of the identical household: Might, the Chinese language-born matriarch; her American daughter, Lily; and Lily’s biracial son, Nick. It opens in 1999, when 22-year-old Lily is working as an unpaid intern at a media firm, a couple of months away from her NYU commencement.
At a vacation social gathering, she meets her boss’s nephew, Matthew, 5 years older and inheritor to a pharmaceutical fortune. Tall and “golden haired,” he’s likable and confident. Lily, then again, is insecure, unambitious and liable to ruminating about what a disappointment she is to her hard-charging mom, an excellent scientist who makes a speciality of—spoiler alert—genetic engineering.
Nonetheless, they fall in love, get married and, after a lot problem, have a child. That baby, a boy named Nick with blond hair and blue eyes, narrates the second part, which begins in 2021, when he’s a teen. He was raised on a distant island off Washington state by his single mom, feeling like a misfit and wishing greater than something to be regular.
Questioning why he doesn’t, as his greatest buddy says, “look Chinese language,” the 2 of them search an internet genetic database and discover Matthew, his long-lost white father. Nick’s subsequent determination to go to Yale (Khong’s alma mater) units up a sequence of dramatic encounters on the east coast with the dad he by no means knew.
Probably the most vivid character within the e-book is Nick’s grandmother Might, who grew up in China throughout the Cultural Revolution and fled to America after making a pact, of kinds, with the satan. She narrates the third part of the e-book in 2030, when she is dying. Solely then are the riddles of Lily and Nick’s discombobulated lives lastly defined.
Khong, who was previously the manager editor of the now defunct meals journal Fortunate Peach, has supplied up a veritable smorgasbord of concepts — about IVF, genetic engineering, completely different cultural kinds of parenting, and what it means to be a “actual American.”
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