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.
... tender ... While switching between Alice’s stepfather’s decline in the late 2010s and Hsieh’s works in the 1980s, Chen develops an intelligent and deeply empathic portrayal of Alice witnessing her stepfather disappearing inside himself, and in doing so offers careful and illuminating observations on issues of cultural difference, productivity, family, and freedom. Chen’s own project is masterly and memorable.
The human urge to fill time with projects of all sorts (movies, furniture building, writing, tying oneself to another person for a year!) is examined from all angles in Chen’s thoughtful and thought-filled meditation on time ... Elegiac and revealing, Chen’s debut illuminates the clock in our hearts.
