Award-winning author Roxane Gay hosts this book club, where we read books by underrepresented American writers, talk about those books, and, when we’re lucky, talk to the writers of those books.
Mary H.K. Choi's debut novel, 2018's Emergency Contact, opens with the particular and unrelenting embarrassment of a teen girl whose mother happens to be a MILF. Choi's protagonist, Penny Lee, is just four days from heading off to college and is at the Apple store with her mom, picking up a promised new phone, when disaster strikes: Penny's mom, Celeste, gets chatted up by the father of one of Penny's high school nemeses: the very rich and very mean Madison Chandler. While Penny tries her best to grab her phone and gather her mom up and get them both out of the store, Madison uses the opportunity not only to call Penny's mom a slut, but to lace her vitriol with a racist trope that is both hateful and woefully incorrect:
"Seriously, what's with your mom's geisha whore outfit?"
…First off, geishas weren't prostitutes. Common mistake. Typically made by the willfully ignorant and intellectually incurious. Some geishas beguiled their clients with dance and artful conversation like in Memoirs of a Geisha, a novel Penny adored until she discovered some rando white guy had written it…
"We're Korean," whispered Penny. Madison's lip twitched in confusion, as if she'd been informed that Africa wasn't a country. "Geishas are Japanese," she finished. If you're going to be racist you should try to be less ignorant, although maybe that was a contradiction…
The scene between Peggy and Madison captures the sharp and specific cruelties that teens are capable of inflicting on each other as well as the sometimes hilarious ways in which those cruelties begin to disintegrate when interrogated. The entire novel, as well as Choi's second and third novels, are set in the world of teenagers and are deeply attuned to its nuances. This is, in great part, thanks to Choi's own investigative work: prior to writing Emergency Contact, Choi wrote an article for Wired that required that she closely observe the lives of teenagers across the country and become familiar with their habits and behaviors.
Choi's fourth book, Pool House, is her debut in adult fiction; some might claim that it is a sharp departure from her previous work. But Pool House carries both the echo of Penny and Celeste's relationship and Choi's diligent reporter's eye, this time attuned not to teenhood, but to motherhood and Hollywood. Pool House maintains a sharp focus on the lives of Stevie, a 20-something who is working at a chain restaurant, and her mother Moon, who once had a somewhat successful career in B movies and television, primarily on a sitcom called "Wabi-Sabi." Pool House opens with a tension similar to the opening of Emergency Contact: Stevie both admires her mother's beauty and laments that she does not measure up. Both Stevie's reverie and her insecurity are interrupted not long after by the death of Mac, who was both Moon's real-life lover and her sitcom husband.
The novel unfolds through the viewpoints of Stevie, Moon, and Adam, Stevie's former sitcom son and Stevie's crush, who comes to stay with them after Mac's funeral. The novel is compact when it comes to plot, but expansive when it comes to character: the narrative rotates through each character's interiority, their many iterations, and their performed roles in a way that is both kaleidoscopic and discomfiting. The scripted family of the sitcom screen and the characters of the novel's world become refractions of one another, challenging our ideas about motherhood, aging, celebrity, and allegiance.
Pool House is an astute and unsettling novel, one that asks us to question our understanding of family, a book that exposes the cult of celebrity to the most unrelenting light. I'm looking forward to discussing this fascinating book with you throughout the month of July.
Roxane Gay’s writing appears in Best American Mystery Stories 2014, Best American Short Stories 2012, Best Sex Writing 2012, A Public Space, McSweeney’s, Tin House, Oxford American, American Short Fiction, Virginia Quarterly Review, and many others. She is a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times. She is the author of the books Ayiti, An Untamed State, the New York Times bestselling Bad Feminist, the nationally bestselling Difficult Women and the New York Times bestselling Hunger. She is also the author of World of Wakanda for Marvel. She has several books forthcoming and is also at work on television and film projects. She also has a newsletter, The Audacity and once had a podcast, The Roxane Gay Agenda.
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