Rueful and tender ... Wang is an exquisite practitioner of deadpan, and her dialogue is full of laugh-aloud zingers. But she also uses humorous insights to pierce the outer shell and plunge into themes of loneliness and despair ... Throughout Wang’s three works of fiction, one discerns the same singular wit and interrogation of mores about gender, ethnicity and income disparity. But here she is at her most poignant and penetrating.
Timely ... Though much of the present action of this funny, deceptively keen and artful novel takes place in one rental house or another, it’s a curious title for the book. The settings are too staged to feel like anything more than the luxury interiors from one of the couple’s favorite real estate shows. Since nothing is theirs, you can’t see their selves, their souls reflected in the rooms through which they move. All of this gives the book, which on its surface is so quick and legible, a quiet depth and sadness.
Wang’s elegantly off-kilter structure has a disruptive quality to it, like an uninvited guest ... Funny but more focused on the melancholies of place once you’ve found it, she dramatizes the riddle of adulthood: Even as you flee a family, you carry it along with you, in memories of how and who you learned to be in the past.
Little gem ... Both contained and far-reaching, funny and serious, neat and messy, all these opposites unified by an intelligent, direct, unapologetic-yet-endearing narrative voice familiar to readers of Wang’s earlier work.
Though ostensibly a comedy of manners built around an opposites-attract couple, Wang’s novel...is a poignant, profound meditation on this divided country enlivened by her dry wit and deadpan style.
ith humor and insight, Wang stretches out domestic entanglements and studies cultural differences by contrasting the two sets of parents ... Wang’s concise language and sharp observations culminate in numerous humorous scenes.
Wang’s depiction is intimate and practical ... There is endless material emerging sideways from the intersecting conflicts of both Keru’s and Nate’s families. Like a real-life marriage, not everything can be easily dissected, explained, and analyzed; rather, sometimes people say things, sometimes people throw things, and Nate and Keru just get on with it. Whether that’s beautiful or deflating may depend on your personal associations with matrimony.
Wang again considers immigrant identity, interracial relationships, socioeconomic divides, and family dysfunction. As Wang matures, so have her characters, inhabiting significantly more soulful, intimate, resonating narratives.
Wang brings a dry humor to the narrative, which moves seamlessly between Nate’s and Keru’s perspectives as the two try to balance the mix of emotions they feel about their parents ... Wang’s writing tends toward the spare. But within this short space, the novel reports on a host of issues.
