You’re a mere five pages into Weike Wang’s masterful novel Rental House when she does this to you, as her married couple main characters, one a first-gen Chinese immigrant, the other a striving son of Appalachia, contest a name for their sheepdog puppy, possibly considering Mantou (steamed bun):
“Nate brought up the propensity of yuppie couples to name their expensive dogs after basic starch items…. There was no fruit or vegetable Keru enjoyed enough to dedicate to their dog. She would also not be giving their dog a human name like Stacy. The other possibility was Huajuan, or a fancy-shaped, swirled steam bun. Nate said the word a few times, believing that he was saying the word right, but Keru said that he was saying the word wrong, and though Nate couldn’t hear where he’d gone wrong, and she couldn’t explain it either, he agreed that Mantou was fine.”
Pin that passage as an exemplar of the old saw about writing the painfully specific to twang the emotional tuning fork of the universal. Which of us doesn’t have a translation problem trying to communicate from our country of one? Wang dissects modern marriage in Rental House — the angst of discovering how much space is enough before absence seems fonder, how easy it is to relish and at the same time chafe at one’s own privilege, how to adult around one’s parents, wondering whether opting to be childless is a selfish or world-improving act. Wang’s unsparing third person omniscient narrator, in an interlude between the two sections of the book (each takes place at a different vacation home), acidly dissects the world as follows: “There is a tendency to take two halves of something and assign them equal weight. Marriage is fifty-fifty, but who said that? Who believes this to be true?”
Just one part of the complication is everyone but orphans comes to marriage trailing the psychic baggage of family. (Not to deny orphans their issues, of course.) For Keru, it’s a desire to please but not become her Chinese parents, especially with a mother who believes that suffering is required — struggle strangles complacency. For Nate, who eventually lands tenure doing fruit fly research, it’s escaping his politically red kin in the Blue Ridge Mountains who refuse the COVID mask mandate. “Whatever science he believed in, he should also know when to keep it to himself,” is how Wang describes Nate’s mom’s opinion. “She wasn’t pushing her science onto him; she wasn’t telling him what to do.” Both Keru and Nate graduate Yale, land good jobs — Keru is a consultant, raking it in (another point of contention, as even tenured profs don’t) — but there’s still a kind of emptiness.
That only gets exacerbated by what’s supposed to be the release of routine brought by vacations. The first rental home, on Cape Cod, sees our couple get sequentially visited by each set of in-laws; the second, in upstate New York, rural yet still in a gated community, leads to unpleasant involvements with neighbors and Nate’s ne’er-do-well brother, who shows up unexpectedly. The inability for vacationing Keru and Nate to retreat to what they do for a living makes it clear how little other life they both have. That particularly leads to complications for Keru, who has a surprising affinity for throwing things. (Even the couple’s meet cute at a Halloween party presages her quick temper.)
Generally a comedy of manners, Rental House — very much not vacation home — can blaze up with violent insolence. But, like Chekhov, Wang has a clear tenderness for her very fallible characters. If they have nothing else, besides a beautiful dog, they have each other, a place they can both work at being immigrants, to build a life in a new land.
This review originally appeared in the California Review of Books.
