WANTING, by Claire Jia
Wealth — its pursuit, maintenance and display — weighs heavy in Claire Jia’s “Wanting,” although it might ultimately exert a more oppressive force on the reader than on its blithely real-estate-hungry protagonists. In this polished debut novel, the ever dependable axes of love and money, and that classic clash of romantic desire with material greed, are dramatized through the story of two friends, Ye Lian and Luo Wenyu.
The women have grown up together in the prosperous environs of 1990s Beijing, watching old Hollywood movies and “Friends” reruns that have fostered aspirational fantasies of life in America. They lost touch when Wenyu moved to California 10 years ago, and now the friends reconnect when Wenyu returns to Beijing, no longer a scrappy schoolgirl with a shoplifting habit but a popular and extremely rich YouTube personality with a pseudonym (“Vivian”), dyed blond hair and a boring white finance-guy fiancé named Thomas.
Meanwhile, Lian — who herself once dreamed of moving to the United States to “own an entire floor of a mall” and become “a true capitalist traitor!” — has never left Beijing. Her life is perfectly respectable: She has a well-paying job working for a tutoring company “that specialized in sending the children of wealthy Chinese executives to American universities”; and a totally unobjectionable physicist boyfriend (from a family slightly richer than hers) with whom she tours luxury condos and plays polite badminton matches every Saturday. But this existence is also stultifying: “Everything in her life was too easy. Like rain falling into a pond. She was too scared to really reach for anything, so she settled for what she received.”
Wenyu’s return explodes this stasis. When Lian discovers that her friend is involved in an extracurricular romance, her shock morphs into jealousy. The Ferrante-like dynamic is a familiar one: Wenyu — ambitious, headstrong, selfish, alluring and possibly bound for ruin — is a sort of Lila to Lian’s more cautious, studious, good-girl Lenu. But Lian’s biggest throb of envy is not for Wenyu’s love affair so much as her influencer status. Jia takes an oddly credulous attitude toward this financially rewarding, spiritually nullifying way of being. As Lian obediently trails her friend through their old haunts in Xidan shopping center to help provide Wenyu with “Chinese content,” the reader is left wondering whether a life spent posting brands and monetizing one’s selfhood could really be worth coveting.
Not every line lands: A smile is described as having been “made hammy by too many meals of expensive ocean fish” (I still haven’t figured out how eating fish could make a person’s smile hammy). But there are also plenty of observations that pierce with their elegance: Thomas’s wish for a pool in the couple’s new summer home is — quite beautifully and miserably — an “unfastened homesickness on the part of the groom run ashore.”
The novel is dominated by the young women and their relationships, both platonic and not, but halfway through an even more affecting subplot emerges. Song Chen, the architect commissioned to create Wenyu’s faux-Modernist mansion, is a middle-aged man sunk by failure, disappointment and humiliation. This secondary character is imbued with more authorial wisdom and a richer inner life than the two younger characters combined. As he watches Wenyu’s pool fill with water, “he thought that life must be like this: a slow trickling that eventually became something that could consume you.”
In a slow but satisfying trickling of narrative, Jia patiently reveals Chen’s back story, which includes a terrible betrayal: “Heartbreak, he realized, was not so much a shattering, but a slow, gradual ache that began in your head and spread to your limbs, until every particle of you panged.” Compared with Lian and Wenyu, who make it out of the novel’s central conflict relatively unscathed and with a net-neutral combined real estate portfolio, Chen in all his soulful wanting is given an ending that aches harder, lasts longer and means more.
WANTING | By Claire Jia | Tin House | 370 pp. | Paperback, $18.99
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