“And yet Lim isn’t pessimistic.” - glowing New Yorker review.

“The core of the novel is pessimistic. How could [it] be otherwise?” - glowing Vulture review

For what it’s worth, I come down on the pro-pessimism reviewer’s side. Maybe that’s partly because this fragmentary and largely plotless novel reminded me of my brief exploration of the alt-lit world. I did not enjoy the alt-lit world. No I did not.
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Addendum: Lim seems to settle the question pretty clearly in an interview with the Chicago Review of Books: “during the years writing it, more and more I found myself increasingly in a state of despair and more and more focused on the horrible situation we seem unable to avoid.”

Sorry, New Yorker, sounds like Lim is pessimistic, alright. And I’m sorry to have not enjoyed a novel by an author of such sympathetic political impulses. ( )

If this short novel (technically novella at 38K words) was any longer, I probably would not have finished it.

Two Asian-American boys in rural Ohio bond over being the only Asian boys in their class and comics. A trio of superheroes (one of which is not from Earth) go to a karaoke bar. Art is used both as a means of protest and as a psychiatrist (or almost). A female super-villain tells her story to an immobilized superhero (more than once). Random characters (mostly from the list of people already mentioned above) tell stories and then others try to upstage them with their own story. A chapter from a pulp novel (which reads more like a bad parody of a pulp novel - I am not even sure if the bad part was intentional or if the author really thinks that this is what pulp novels sound like). Political commentary and protest against the corporations, thinly disguised as philosophy and plot points.

Each of these on its own may have made a decent story. Instead Lim just put all of them in a blender, sprinkled some action and actual facts (the stories of Richard Aoki and Kiyoshi Kuromiya) and served the result to us well chilled. It is a jagged mess of half-stories and attempts at philosophy (which almost never work and often sound like word salad). The story requires patience - things that do not make sense get clearer as the novel progresses and the last chapter ties everything together and explains what we had been reading (or almost does anyway). I can see what the author was trying to achieve and maybe a different author would have pulled it off. This one did not really succeed - at the end, what remains is the jaggedness and not the cohesiveness of the story.

Maybe this will work better for someone who like nontraditional forms more than I do. I usually love structures which employ nested stories and this one makes an attempt at that (or at a broken form of it) but something is missing and just does not fit well to actually close the structure properly - for the most part the novel feels like a puzzle - except that pieces of it had been removed and pieces from 4 other puzzles had been added instead. ( )

decent but pretty clunky at times ( )

A somewhat stoned pass through late 20th early 21st century American introversions of arts and superheros, protests and wage slave jobs, with an Asian outsiders viewpoint. But only a little fun, and little new in expressions of frustrations or outrage. ( )

Another of the ToB shortlist for 2018 and this may have been the biggest disappointment so far. Staccato bursts of geeky interest that reveal onion layers of not terribly much. Parts of this felt like chore, sadly, and there was no great payoff bringing it all together. It was all a bit... er... bitty. ( )