<body><div><img src="https://img.particlenews.com/image.php?type=thumbnail_580x000&amp;url=4IL65z_0vxvDLEi00" alt="https://img.particlenews.com/image.php?url=4IL65z_0vxvDLEi00" width="825" height="1275" >[Tin House; 2024]Meadow—the charming, frustrating, chronically hungover protagonist at the center of Mike Fu’s debut novel, Masquerade—is floundering through the dog days of his protracted youth. Wallowing “in the inertia of his early thirties,” Meadow has been ghosted by the ever-elusive Diego following an amorous month-long entanglement, and he’s been ousted from his Bed-Stuy sublet by his kombucha-guzzling landlords, who need to make room in their brownstone for a nursery. The beguiling Selma, a fellow Brooklyn socialite, encourages him to crash at her swanky Clinton Hill digs rent-free while she wraps up an artist’s residency, and Meadow is rooting around his temporary home, in desperate search of his passport ahead of a flight to Shanghai to see his parents, when he discovers The Masquerade, a translated Chinese novel from 1940 written by a “Liu Tian.” It’s a name that resonates with Meadow—his Chinese name is, coincidentally, also Liu Tian.The coincidences hardly stop there. Mike Fu’s Masquerade is something of a Pandora’s Box; mirrors, parallels, doubles, and doppelgangers abound, lending a whisper of the occult to the novel’s hypnotic atmosphere. Seemingly every detail from the book Meadow discovers has a connection to his life, whether it’s the author’s name or the eerie similarity between its subject matter and Meadow’s own abandoned PhD in comparative literature. Before he left his program, his dissertation was “ostensibly about cosmopolitan enclaves in Shanghai during the Republican period and the well-documented realm of luxury and indulgence that existed parallel to the simmering politics of the day.” The novel he discovers would’ve fit perfectly with his research: set during the Republican era, it takes place at a “masquerade ball in high society Shanghai in the late 1930s.”It’s tempting, and perhaps inevitable, to attempt to decode meaning in the uncanny symmetry between The Masquerade (as in the novel nested within Fu’s novel) and our protagonist’s life; Meadow himself is already susceptible to such impulses as he regularly “strains to decipher” whispers of “meaning in the mundane.” Meadow’s natural predilections are amplified by the fact that he discovers the text in Selma’s apartment, someone who is “interested in the potentiality of viewing everyday objects, places, and even people around her as a conduit to artistic expression, if not the medium itself.” It seems possible that Selma, a slithery operator with a proclivity for manipulation, has lured Meadow into some kind of elaborate piece of performance art.It’s a seductive theory, and I’d imagine it easy to find oneself lost in Masquerade’s, per the back-cover blurbs, “jigsaw plotting” and “Nabokovian puzzle.” But behind the novel’s smokescreen of implausible, borderline supernatural occurrences, there’s something a bit more conventional, at least as it pertains to debuts in literary fiction, at play, namely when it comes to Meadow’s potential calling: “So you’re a writer, then,” one of Selma’s dinner party guests, Edward, assumes of Meadow, who responds quickly with an emphatic no. “I just . . . think about the story, as a form,” Meadow replies, calling it an “arbitrary” construct to “make sense out of the senseless. Not just in books and movies or whatever, but in the way we imagine our lives and how we relate to other people.” Edward encourages Meadow to “vanquish” his ideas “head-on” through writing, but Meadow isn’t convinced: “Hell no, Meadow wanted to say.”Meadow maintains his convictions about not being a writer throughout Masquerade. I don’t think it’s giving anything away to say that, by the end of Masquerade, I was pretty certain that Meadow would become a writer—a sentiment amplified by his fixation on the nested novel’s final page, which directs the reader to “write a story that feels just and true.” The general arc of a writerly bildungsroman is apparent from the opening pages, even if the surreal flourishes and achronological structure lead the reader astray, as Meadow develops a sense of agency about his life and begins to “wrest control of his story.” Meadow seems to slowly realize that telling your story doesn’t necessarily mean succumbing to the hefty weight of narrativization, which is to say that reality is messy and incoherent—why not make stories that way?We get an example of such a story towards the end of Masquerade, when Meadow attends an experimental play with only the “vaguest thread of a plotline,” where most scenes represent “dreamscapes and fantasies, unfulfilled wishes, alternate realities.” Making manifest such interior worlds may be a form of storytelling, but it is surely not indulging any kind of conventional narrative tendencies. No wonder Meadow, someone who’s so conflicted about the arbitrary nature of story, finds himself “surprised by the swell of emotion that he, too, feels at the conclusion of this [the production’s] bewildering experience.” It’s a line I kept returning to upon novel’s end. The hazy, unexpected sentiment the play evokes in Meadow isn’t so dissimilar from the way I felt upon finishing Masquerade. Fu obfuscates this emotion for the majority of his novel, camouflaging his story’s poignancy beneath a thick carapace of narrative flair. Along the way he hints at various directions the story might take, showing impressive restraint in not wandering too far down some of his novel’s countless rabbit holes.One potential path I thought Fu would take is that of political satire, whereby upper-crust artistic types in New York’s most fashionable borough enjoy lavish social lives while the world around them burns. There’s a murmur of Bolaño in the novel Meadow discovers in the way it contrasts the decadence of Shanghai’s elite against the precarious political moment they’re living through: “Shanghai was being crushed under the military occupation of the Empire of Japan. Men like Mizuno [the nested novel’s protagonist] would rather see it as but a minor inconvenience, filling their time with their gin rickeys and horse races, movie premieres and garden parties.” Meadow and his fellow Brooklynites seem to occasionally amount to contemporary iterations of such blissfully ignorant aristocrats—albeit with slightly less disposable income—and yet Fu refuses to make a heavy-handed connection between the respective groups.I also had suspicions that this would become something of an identity-formation novel—primarily about Meadow bridging the gap between his parents’ stable sense of place in Shanghai and his own itinerant upbringing. “This nowhere-space is his home,” reads the prologue as Meadow flies from New York to Shanghai, “a grown-ass man still clueless about who he is or what he’s doing.” There’s a liminality to Meadow’s existence: He’s plunging “deeper and deeper into the dark nowhere of the in-between.” This feeling of perpetual transition stems in part from a childhood that took him from Tennessee, to an international school in Shanghai, to his aunt’s home in Indiana, to college in the Bay Area. He was constantly awaiting his next departure, never certain of “the world to which he truly belonged.” And while any feelings of ostracization were surely deepened by his queerness—the American South and Midwest are hardly the easiest places to grow up gay, not to mention Asian—this connection is seldom made explicit. It’s an ambiguity that I find refreshing. Fu doesn’t feel the need to explain Meadow’s queerness in the same way that writers never feel the need to explain a character’s straightness.And nothing, for that matter, is explained to a satisfying degree in Masquerade. The narration—written primarily in third-person present—is interspersed with countless flashbacks, and I spent the novel suspended in a ceaseless state of anticipation, expecting the coming flashback to finally provide some answers. Inevitably, it just introduced new questions, and I actually came to appreciate Fu’s steadfast determination to deprive the reader of any narrative catharsis.Masquerade amounts to a kind of existential lesson for its protagonist, Meadow, someone who “yearned to give shape” to his “desire, explain in words what the pulsing vital mass within him was driving at.” It’s a conspicuously writerly impulse for someone to have who’s so adamant about not being a writer, and I think the lesson being taught is about the impossibility of giving “shape” to desires. Wresting control of your story doesn’t mean turning your life into a narrative; it means accepting the sheer absence of a deliberate plot (a kind of post-religious epiphany if there ever was one). And I say this lesson is “taught” and not “learned” because the degree to which Meadow registers the message is unclear. He may realize that he’s spent his summer “futilely attempting to scrabble together any sense” out of his life, but he also makes a momentous life decision at novel’s end—one I don’t want to give away—that, while encouraging in its agency, is also potentially worrisome in how it entertains more conventional narrative impulses. I spent much of Masquerade wondering why the hyper-intimate narration wasn’t just written in first person from Meadow’s perspective, and I think the appropriately inscrutable ending effectively answers that question, providing some distance between the story—or lack thereof—being told and Meadow’s grasp on it.Clearly, this is an exciting debut from a supremely confident writer, someone with an impressive ability to dwell in ambiguities and uncertainties without reaching for easy answers. And yet, an honest assessment of Masquerade seems incomplete without a note on style.Meadow describes the novel he discovers as featuring “flowing English prose” that’s “peppered with the antiquated locutions of a bygone era.” He can “picture the characters so vividly, his mind conjuring up the lush visual textures of this world.” I wonder if this was a self-aware wink at the reader, because Fu’s prose reads as being similarly antiquated in its careful scene setting and lengthy, lush descriptions. Meadow’s father, a fan of English literature, named his son after a Tennyson poem, and that kind of classical tradition seems present in Fu’s writing.There is, certainly, a cinematic quality to Fu’s prose, which is probably best seen in his sensuous depictions of queer lust. There is also, however, an exasperating quality to Fu’s writing, as scenes often devolve into lists of minutely observed character movements—the perpetually hungover Meadow usually took a couple paragraphs to get out of bed—and as New York is repeatedly depicted with an idealized, fairytale tint, where Fu is, it must be said, pathologically fixated on the color of the sky.The restraint Fu shows with his narrative isn’t replicated with his writing, something that creeps into his dialogue, where characters seldom “said” things. Rather—and this is all from a single page—they “asked,” “offered,” “considered,” “mused,” and “grinned.” In my mind, Fu’s diversity of dialogue tags suggests a lack of confidence in his own conversational ear. That is, the characters’ words aren’t communicating things effectively, and so Fu compensates with an endless onslaught of moody verbs. In good dialogue the tags disappear, and in Fu’s novel they often—not always—jump off the page. Even when characters do just “say” something, it’s usually followed by a modifier, as characters speak “blandly” and “half-heartedly” and “weakly” and “thoughtfully.” And if this incursion of adverbs didn’t do the trick, then the character would, without fail, “furrow their brow,” one of a number of banal expressions dispersed throughout Masquerade (characters regularly did things in “no time flat”).All that said, I did still devour Masquerade, and it stuck with me for days after the fact. Putting aside the adverbs and the tedious physical descriptions, Fu’s debut is an affecting, arresting bildungsroman that is somehow both intricately plotted and wholly uninterested in plot. The pieces never quite come together, and yet I’m not sure it matters. The twisting narrative isn’t in service of a fateful, revelatory climax; it is, rather, an acute rendering of the mental gymnastics a writer goes through before accepting their truth: They must write.Michael Knapp‘s writing has appeared in The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Cleveland Review of Books, The Adroit Journal, and elsewhere. He received his MFA from the Writer’s Foundry.</div></body>

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Masquerade – Mike Fu

Meadow—the charming, frustrating, chronically hungover protagonist at the center of Mike Fu’s debut novel, Masquerade—is floundering through the dog days of his protracted youth. Wallowing “in the inertia of his early thirties,” Meadow has been ghosted by the ever-elusive Diego following an amorous month-long entanglement, and he’s been ousted from his Bed-Stuy sublet by his kombucha-guzzling landlords, who need to make room in their brownstone for a nursery. The beguiling Selma, a fellow Brooklyn socialite, encourages him to crash at her swanky Clinton Hill digs rent-free while she wraps up an artist’s residency, and Meadow is rooting around his temporary home, in desperate search of his passport ahead of a flight to Shanghai to see his parents, when he discovers The Masquerade, a translated Chinese novel from 1940 written by a “Liu Tian.” It’s a name that resonates with Meadow—his Chinese name is, coincidentally, also Liu Tian.