Rental House

Starred review from October 1, 2024
An interracial couple vacations with both sets of parents. Following the success of her novelsChemistry (2017) andJoan Is Okay (2022), Wang returns with the story of Keru and Nate, a Chinese American woman and a white man who meet at Yale, fall in love, and get married. Some years later, they go on two vacations--to Cape Cod and the Catskills--during which both sets of parents, as well as some unexpected visitors, come to stay with them. As they share rental houses with their families (and their large dog, Mantou), racial, cultural, and class tensions come to the surface. Keru's Chinese immigrant parents are demanding and rigid, while Nate's white, Appalachian, working-class parents (the couple argues at one point about whether they're "white trash") have their own set of particularities and prejudices. Keru chafes against Nate's parents' rural conservatism, occasional racism, and constant need to keep up appearances through pleasantries, even when conflict lurks beneath the surface. On the other hand, Nate feels intimidated and judged for his amateur Mandarin skills and reliance upon bourgeois comforts that Keru's parents, as immigrants who have had to live in less ideal conditions, feel are lazy. (In one memorable incident, Keru's father proclaims that "to use a dishwasher is to admit defeat.") Caught in the crossfire of these contrasting mentalities and expectations, Keru and Nate are forced to reflect on the values that shape their relationship and their burgeoning family. Wang is an incisive writer with sharp psychological insight who does dialogue particularly well, revealing what is not said in conversation just as much as what is said out loud. This quietly engrossing novel is subtle and powerful in its cultural critique and will surely be relatable for anyone who has in-laws. A compelling portrait of family dynamics under pressure.

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Starred review from October 7, 2024
In this wonderfully acerbic outing from Wang (Joan Is Okay), a married couple from New York City face pressure from their in-laws and others on two separate vacations. First, Nate and Keru host Keru’s Chinese immigrant parents on Cape Cod, where they’ve rented a house. On their final night together, they debate the virtues of suffering, which Keru’s mother prizes as essential to a person’s success. Then they host Nate’s parents, blue-collar Trump supporters from the Blue Ridge Mountains who Keru struggles to connect with, especially after Nate’s mother complains about the house being too small. Five years later, the couple rents a bungalow in the Catskills, where comments from neighbors about their “double income, no kids” household activate a long-dormant fault line in the couple’s relationship: Nate, a scientist, earns far less than Keru, a business consultant. Later, Nate’s deadbeat older brother makes a surprise appearance, talking up his newest business venture, a gym, and pressuring Nate to invest in it. Wang excels at setting the tone with biting prose, describing the Catskills’ fall foliage as the “mass death of deciduous leaves,” and the scenes of family drama are compulsively readable. It’s a tour de force. Agent: Joy Harris, Joy Harris Literary.

November 1, 2024
Keru seems to have an enviable life. She's married to her college sweetheart. They both have Yale degrees. She enjoys a successful consulting career, currently assigned to a high-power eight-month project in Chicago while Nathan remains professoring in Manhattan. They purposefully don't have kids, content with fur baby Mantou. They take nice vacations, and in these rental houses Wang cleverly reveals what's behind the fragile fa�ades. In the "classic New England cottage" at the Cape, the couple ensure that visits are "strategic." First, there's Keru's immigrant Chinese American parents, still obsessive-compulsively concerned about pandemic-induced safety, then Nathan's North Carolinian parents, who hail from the other end of that spectrum, beyond objections to vaccines and quarantines. Five years later, the couple is in a tony Catskills bungalow for Nathan's fortieth birthday, where the companionship of cosmopolitan strangers and the unannounced visit of Nathan's estranged brother and his latest not-girlfriend expose growing instability. In her third novel, award-winning 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.

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December 1, 2024

Award-winning Wang (author of the multi-best-booked Joan Is Okay) examines the challenges of family and marriage. Keru is the daughter of strict, well-educated Chinese immigrant parents, while Nate comes from a white, working-class family. Keru and Nate marry, but when their families join them on vacation, the couple's strained relationships with their in-laws force them to confront their own hidden truths. Prepub Alert.

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