{"id":8171,"date":"2019-05-08T11:32:52","date_gmt":"2019-05-08T11:32:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/?p=8171"},"modified":"2019-05-15T11:24:45","modified_gmt":"2019-05-15T11:24:45","slug":"the-unpassing-by-chia-chia-lin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/?p=8171","title":{"rendered":"The Unpassing by Chia-Chia Lin"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux 7 May 2019<\/strong><\/p>\n

288pp, hardback, $26<\/strong><\/p>\n

Reviewed by Elsbeth Lindner<\/strong><\/p>\n

Click here to buy this book<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Death and suffering, poverty and guilt suffuse – to the point of drowning – this unhappy first novel. Every departure from the main narrative thread \u2013 whether it\u2019s the Challenger disaster or the Exxon Valdez oil spill \u2013 adds another overwhelming layer of mortality and horror to the story. But one crowning loss binds the tale, the death of a child and the suffocating layers of blame and responsibility that lay waste to the surviving family members.<\/p>\n

Narrated from the perspective of boy child Gavin, the novel traces the experiences of a family of Taiwanese immigrants living \u2013 if it can be called that \u2013 a life of borderline destitution in Alaska. The father was an engineer but now scrapes an income working on occasional building projects, the failure of one of which will tip the family even further into penury. The mother, who still reaches back to life in Taiwan, her family there and a rural idyll of coastal life, is bitter and at times demented. The four children divide into two boys \u2013 Gavin and his younger brother Natty \u2013 and two girls, eldest Pei-Pei and much younger Ruby.<\/p>\n

Early on, Gavin returns from school with a fever and falls unconscious. When he awakes, many days later, Ruby is dead. And gone. All traces of her have been removed, except \u2013 it emerges later \u2013 for the urn containing her ashes, hidden on a high shelf in a wardrobe. Gavin had imported meningitis from school, but survived it himself. However the entire episode remains a family taboo, leaving all the members isolated in their own grief, most of all Gavin who blames himself for Ruby\u2019s loss.<\/p>\n

Atmospheric is scarcely an adequate term to describe the intensity of Lin\u2019s evocation of the fabric of this family\u2019s life. Clothing, terrible food, the flimsy home, its accumulated junk, the detritus in the attic \u2013 all of it is conveyed in near-palpable detail, piling on the bleakness of the novel\u2019s mood. Even when rare good moments occur, like an evening spent in the home of a generous neighbor, Gavin is incapable of experiencing enjoyment. Instead, death lurks at every corner \u2013 in the attic where animal bones are found, in the forest where trees nearly fall on people, on the beach where a stranded whale almost succumbs.<\/p>\n

Lin is undoubtedly a talented writer whose invocation of this group – their individual psychologies and combined tragedy – is achieved with numbing impact. Yet the book is impossibly burdened by its surfeit of bleakness and fixed tone. Fingers crossed that her second will offer more in the way of light and shade.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Reviewed by Elsbeth Lindner<\/p>\n

Atmospheric is scarcely an adequate term to describe the intensity of Lin\u2019s evocation of the fabric of this family\u2019s life. Clothing, terrible food, the flimsy home, its accumulated junk, the detritus in the attic \u2013 all of it is conveyed in near-palpable detail, piling on the bleakness of the novel\u2019s mood. Even when rare good moments occur, like an evening spent in the home of a generous neighbor, Gavin is incapable of experiencing enjoyment […] in Reviews<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8171","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-new-fiction-and-non-fiction","category-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8171","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8171"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8171\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8173,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8171\/revisions\/8173"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8171"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8171"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8171"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}