Five Star Billionaire by Tash Aw
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Four people dealing with Shanghai—the book jacket will tell you five, but one of them is Shanghai, for all intents and purposes. He’s the ostensible narrator, in his own sections, the giver of unsolicited, but not unwanted advice. His platitudes are chapter titles, and they amount to a reluctant resistance to existential angst.
The other four are narrated in third person, intimacy held at arm’s length. We Westerners will call them inscrutable, that word laced with a little less racism than the erstwhile “Oriental.” But this is the Occident in the East, now, this new Shanghai, same as they old Shanghai, to steal a line from that currently-revered band from the 70s. Or 60s. Or whatever—it was before my time.
This Shanghai is all too familiar to those of us, readers, who’ve experienced The Character of A City through books. This new China is New York, is New Angeles, is New ‘Cago. (Sorry, I’m trying to be inventive. I’m not doing a good job. I’m a foreigner her myself). Themes of aliens but not alienation run through Aw’s novel, copy cats without simulacrum, fate without destiny.
I liked the minor interweaving of the character’s lives in the novel, liked the small shifts in style Aw achieved between chapters. It got a bit tedious towards the end, despite the all-to-predictable “surprise” (not enough of a pay-off to justify the tedium, but then I don’t think that the surprise was intended to be any kind of pay-off or climax; see above, re: fate without destiny). There were a few places, maybe, where a character’s own character shift was a bit sudden… but I didn’t mind that so much.
Read this because it’s on the Booker prize long-list for 2013. I don’t think it will make the short list, (read this review post-October and see if I’m right) but I’m still glad I read it.