Like many readers in the last year and a half, I had read Celeste Ng's celebrated novel Little Fires Everywhere. But recently, I went back and read her 2014 novel, Everything I Never Told You, which is my book club's pick for our May meeting. The story of a Chinese-American family living in 1970's small town Ohio, this delves into the years before and the months following a pivotal moment in the family's timeline.
From the moment Marilyn and James meet, they know that their relationship will be like no other. Born to Chinese parents, James has spent his life in America feeling distinctly "other", never quite fitting in, working toward the best education possible. Marilyn, raised by a single mother who teaches home ec, bucks against domesticity and wants desperately to be taken seriously as a student of math and science in a time when these are male dominated fields. These two outsiders find kindred spirits in one another, finally seen and accepted for who they are. Yet their own insecurities linger, causing tension and friction as they try to find their respective ways forward together as a couple and later as parents themselves. These long-held beliefs also will color how they parent their three children, Nathan, Lydia and Hannah, driving the family as a whole toward crisis. As the title suggests, communication, and the lack thereof, is one of the main themes in the novel. It's Ng's spare prose and beautifully drawn characters that made this almost impossible to put down.
Highly recommended.
No comments:
Post a Comment