The Wound and the Show
Kat Tang’s debut, Five-Star Stranger, has a very bright and colorful dustjacket, but its less than effusive narrator, if not exactly unreliable, is not given to telling us what he’s feeling, and we sense that if we ever find out, somber tones will replace the nearly gaudy ones that first greeted us. He’s an actor of a sort, and definitely a dissembler. One has heard of people paid to mourn at funerals, and this is the kind of work Tang’s unnamed hero does, using an app called “Rental Stranger” on which people can hire him as a fake lover, friend, family member, etc., which takes him all over New York, including to a funeral in Brooklyn. The most fraught of his regular roles is that of husband to a woman named Mari, and father to her daughter Lily, which involves a complicated series of lies told to the credulous but rather watchful little girl. They live well uptown and Mari can barely afford his services; after a dinner by Chef Boyardee and cash for the overtime from a belated Mari, he takes the subway to the Upper West Side, where he rents a suit and finds his seat at a tony restaurant opposite a middle-aged woman, to whom he is to propose in the sightlines of the man, dining there with his wife, with whom she has been having an affair. Tang has taken some time to think through the uses such talents as her narrator’s could be put to, and through his particular professional difficulties. The purpose of the dinner is to show the man that the woman is an eligible bachelorette, eligible enough in fact to turn down this offer, and this makes the job trickier for the narrator, since “a rejected proposal was a tragicomedy that could make the rounds on the internet,” on video, and he needs anonymity to keep working.
The novel’s themes are the capture of emotions as commodities, relationships as work, work as a series of relationships: though the narrator is given a rough backstory with major trauma, and some quirks traceable to that past, he is to be taken as a version of many of Tang’s readers. So he is written to reassure with his cynical state of the world summary, in which “politicians kept politicking,” and with his refusal to judge his clients for commissioning his deceptions, which are neither black nor white lies, but “shades of moral gray.” There is a vague sense that something is wrong, that one is involved in the wrongness, then a recoiling due to an aversion to ever sounding judgmental, including of oneself, so that guilt is temporarily dispelled. Does this sound familiar? Tang designs the narrator as a man struggling because he’s blocking self-knowledge, lying and sometimes forgetting the truth, and blank enough to take on any features the reader, just like one of his clients, desires to see. She may not have meant him to be quite this boring, however.
The problem is partly the narrative mode: Tang is necessarily limited to his view, and what that view offers is quick, journalistic observations about class, race, and manners. In a novel, social realism is only worthwhile when it goes further, slower, and perhaps deeper than the op-ed column or the essay. In Five-Star Stranger, the only depth and shading is the contrast between the brightly lit city life, and the dark alley where the narrator’s bad memories are lurking. In the city, each character has a role, and a costume, and any novelistic noticing is missing. A fellow rental stranger, older and with a thespian flair, “wore the air of a professor-of-a-small-college-you-never-heard-of-somewhere-in-New England,” while an MFA student, Darlene, wears a poncho and combat boots that give an “air of clothing-as-necessity.” And there is a finance bro, Ajay anglicized as A.J., with no airs at all, in fleece and a long-sleeve dress shirt, with a luxury condo where his personality should be. However much they are exposed, sometimes by the demands they make of the narrator, these characters seem like either walking trends, objects of cultural commentary personified, or ancillary people in a magazine profile.
Fiction that seeks out this altitude, knee height on the coffee table, can’t be much more than mildly interesting. It is not so much a matter of closer attention as it is of the willingness to transform what is seen: Adelle Waldman’s The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P., another New York novel of manners, and this one by a former journalist, is as close as one can get to the novel as essay on the culture, but it allows other perceptions, as when hero Nate, at a farm-to-table restaurant, registers a waiter’s “checkered shirt and high-waisted pants” and is reminded “less of a farmer than a scarecrow.” Five-Star Stranger is in better form when Tang is directly at work on her fake, not quite nuclear family. Lily has her precociousness, enough character for a girl of nine, while Mari is given alcoholism and insecurity (“who are you to tell me how to raise my daughter?”), and the narrator’s feelings for them are involved in fraught enough ways with his difficult past that the idiosyncrasies they lack are not felt to be missing.
Something ought to be said, sensitively, cautiously, of that past. By design, it deranges everything else. It flashes at the window and rumbles in the distance when the narrator mentions that he never knew his father, or that he fears the dark. He is both asking for our sympathy and asking us to keep reading, which in a novel as imaginatively limited as Five-Star Stranger is the same thing. Some of his clients might have little secrets, but he has a sad story leading up to a horrible, unforgettable scene, and problems to match. The story is supposed to show how much more there is to people than what they routinely show each other, but it doesn’t seem to know what that might be, beyond the sordid revelations of what critic Parul Seghal has called the “trauma plot,” and criticized as such, in The New Yorker. These kinds of stories, in which someone is suffering some problem of nerves or communication, and an awful episode will eventually be forced out as a confession or depicted in flashback, might or might not “flatten” character. They definitely give momentum to a plot, as well as a recursive pattern of narration in which the past keeps looming up out of the fog and has to be pushed back, and novelists are happy to have these things helping them along as they write.
British critic Peter Kemp has seen all the trauma excavation plots of the last half century as instances of a preoccupation by novelists with the past, in this case personal, in others historical and literary. And it is a strange thing, maybe deliberate, that this novel is ostensibly looking squarely forward at social changes—commodification of our personal lives and a fictional new app that makes it possible, increased cynicism and isolation—and should then depend so utterly for its drama on pieced out accounts of the narrator’s history. This may make perfect sense, if isolation involves further self-involvement: when you look in the mirror you see not just yourself, but whatever is behind you. Obviously, the goal is not to become Narcissus. The therapeutic model is to be applied so that the trauma can be identified, and symptoms managed, and then everyone can keep moving forward, as does our five-star stranger. But characters, if they are to be filled out, should be more than patients, as Seghal urges, so that the novels enclosing them can be more than case studies. To start with, they need their own observations about what’s around them, not the ones made for them by magazine writers, and they can’t make those if they’re only thinking about their own story. One has stepped cautiously around the crime scene so as to avoid spoiling the surprise of Five-Star Stranger’s particular trauma, but the novel has already been spoiled, before you begin reading it, by that bloody mess.
Kazuo Robinson is a writer based in New York. His reviews have been published in The Adroit Journal, Cleveland Review of Books, The Oxonian Review, and Chicago Review of Books. He maintains a Substack at kazuorobinson.substack.com where he writes all about fiction.
