CHARLES YU — INTERIOR CHINATOWN

What we have is a novel in screenplay form about the experience of Generic Asian Man. His quest is to transcend being generic. It’s funny, thought provoking, and given the rise of anti-Asian violence in America right now, it’s politically vital and worth reading for that reason alone.   

I found it a pleasure to engage with the form of this novel. Screenplays are easy on the eyes, laid out in such a way that you can read swiftly and recognize at a glance what’s important and what’s not. There’s something honest about putting important events and characters in BOLD ALL-CAPS. 

Screenplays, as a form, are meant to boil characters down to the essential — in practical terms, the business of fully rounding out characters is not the business of screenplays but the business of actors. So, effective screenplays involve the generic as an essential part of their aesthetic shorthand.  

The big joke here — the loaded joke, the defining structural irony of Interior Chinatown — is that the characters labeled as generic (Generic Asian Man, Older Brother, etc.) are anything but: they have emotions, hopes, dreams. Indeed, I find this a resonant irony, and interesting on an intellectual level. But I didn’t quite find it poignant. Here’s why: 

There are scenes. Some of them are emotional; all are well-drawn. But there are also passages in Interior Chinatown that read like a very creative sociology textbook. Mr. Yu took several opportunities to digress from his story into theory. This is a valid approach, but it also took me out of the emotional lives of the characters. Every time we cut away from them, the whole formal experiment lost integrity for me; the characters started feeling a little more generic again.  

I’ll admit I had a worry about this novel from the very first page: will I find it more compelling as a concept than a work of fiction? Unfortunately, I did find Interior Chinatown more compelling as a concept than as a work of fiction. Such is the cruel bargain of bold aesthetic concepts: the medium can outshine the message. See all of 20th Century Modern Literature.