Like the work of writer Rachel Cusk, who brought new thinking to what constitutes a novel, Activities of Daily Living takes chances with the form to strong effect ... In delivering a meditation on human frailty and endurance, Chen shows us how we cling to our chosen work and the hope buried within it ... The whole novel reads like a project coming into existence. As the book suggests, I’m not sure if we’re seeing art or pathology on the page, but in this case, what’s the difference? Both pass the time, and both are a form of love.
Chen writes with cool, elegant precision, and the book is compelling despite its diffuse structure, and its withholding of the usual pleasures of fiction, like plot and character development. As the Father’s condition worsens, Alice grapples with the direction of her project, how to give it bones and define its contours. This is also the central challenge for Chen, who set out to write an unconventional, rambling novel of ideas and make it hang together with minimal narrative tension. Like Hsieh’s performance art, Activities of Daily Living revels in the mundane and repetitive, the simple, inexorable passage of time. It is by no means a page-turner, but it’s an utterly persuasive transmutation of the ordinary stuff of life.
... astringent, witty, attuned to the suddenly dimmed lighting and shrunken horizons experienced by city dwellers in early middle age. It is studded with brief chapters—speculative, ruminant—about the wisdom of buying bundt pans, the military etymology of 'basket case,' how textureless voice technologies are rendering Braille obsolete.
