Keru and Nate first meet in college, brought together by a joke at a Halloween party and marrying a few years later. Misfits in their own families, they find in each other a feeling of home. Keru is the only child of strict, well-educated Chinese immigrant parents who hold her to impossible standards even as an adult. Nate is from a rural, white, working class family that has never trusted his intellectual ambitions or, now, the citizenship status of his 'foreign' wife. Nevertheless, some years into their marriage, Keru and Nate find themselves incorporating their families into two carefully planned vacations.
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.
