Book Review: An Excess Male, by Maggie Shen King

This is one of the best book I've read.

Set in a near-future China, An Excess Male follows the story of Wei-Guo as he tries to marry into the family of Mei-ling as her third husband. Extrapolating from the present-day consequences of China's one-child policy, Maggie Shen King envisions a dystopia where an excess of males (over 40 million) in the population has lead to women taking second and now third husbands. These unmarriageable men are known as 'The Bounty,' and most of their lives are centered around raising money for a dowry and hoping they are lucky enough to impressive the right woman.

We begin the story by watching Wei-Guo try to woo Mei-ling by inviting her to a private meeting at his exercise studio (he works as a physical trainer, helping those of The Bounty fulfill their state-mandated fitness regiment). However, the moment Mei-ling stumbles in carrying her hyperactive toddler his plans fall to pieces. Her first husband, Hann, joins them soon after, and what Wei-Guo envisioned as a seductive date turns into an awkward dance lesson between the four of them. It is here that we begin to realize that he is not marrying Mei-ling, but her family, a point reiterated throughout the book. We quickly learn more about Mei-ling and Hann and his brother, Xiong-xin (or XX, as he prefers to call himself), and the story develops into an intensely personal examination of oppression, cultural values, and the ways in which people's lives are shaped by the society around them.

Hann is gay or, as the government puts it, 'Willfully Sterile,' a fact he has done his best to keep hidden from all those outside of his family. His brother, XX, is somewhere on the autism spectrum, and though he is a genius working for one of the most important digital security corporations in China, his quirks constantly threaten to out him as abnormal. Hann, also a very successful man, has spent most of his life trying to protect himself and his brother, and he has spent the majority of his marriage trying to convince Mei-ling that his homosexuality is not a choice. Mei-ling, for her part, loves Hann and their child, but has grown to resent XX, and sees Wei-Guo as a potential outlet for her sexual frustration. She spends her time taking care of their one child (she is expected to sleep with each of her husbands once a week until she conceives one child for each, but has only conceived with Hann). If either of her husband's 'conditions' are discovered, the family risks dissolution, forced sterilization, and the loss of their child to the state.

The resulting drama and peril covers a wide breadth of thought-provoking themes: oppression, family, gender relationships, sex and love--but what drives everything is the characters. We cycle through each of their perspectives as the novel progresses, seeing how each of them thinks and perceives the world. The writing makes each of their personalities shine through. Each unique voice garners sympathy and understanding. Several times through the book one character makes a decision that proves detrimental to one or more of the others, yet at no point does anyone become a villain. We root for all our characters, even when they are directly opposed to the others. The novel is presented as the story of Wei-Guo, but he is no more the protagonist than any of the other three. This is the story of an ensemble; a family.

Family is the most prominent element in the work. It is the central tension between all our characters: Mei-ling struggles to accept her family, Hann struggles to keep his family together, XX struggles to find his place in its structure, all while Wei-Guo tries to become a part of the whole big mess. The imagery, symbolism, and more often than not the literal text are all focused around how and why people make up families. Our characters become deeply entangled with each other's lives long before marriage becomes a reality, and we realize family goes beyond living under the same roof or a contract under the law; it is what we make of it, and what we need to survive.

Of all the books I've read this year, this was the best. It was moving; exciting; and tragic. I empathized with these characters more than any others I can think of. I have not said much about the world or the plot because so much of it is revealed through our character's eyes, and their interpretations and decisions drive the story forward. It is enough to say that King's dystopia is fascinating, horrifying, gripping, and all too plausible.

An Excess Male is available on Amazon in print, ebook, and audio formats and wherever books are sold. Read it.

Book Review: The Lives of Tao, by Wesley Chu

The best thing I can say about this book is that it would make a passable action movie if you cut about 3/4th of it.

The premise of the novel is interesting: a ship full of gaseous aliens crashed-landed on Earth millions of years ago and they have since guided evolution and history to create a species capable of developing the technology needed to bring them back to their home. These aliens, the Quasing, cannot survive in the terrestrial atmosphere, but they can inhabit humans (or other animals if they need to), forming a parasitic relationship. They can speak to and read the minds of their hosts, and even control their bodies while they sleep. Although these elements promise an interesting story little is done with them throughout the book.

The story proper begins when Tao, a Quasing, inhabits the body of Roen Tan, an unsuspecting computer programmer living in modern times. However, aside from short spurts at the beginning of each chapter, we do no see the lives of Tao so much as the beginning of his life with Roen who is, at best, a total schmuck. By this time the Quasing have split into two warring factions: the Genjix and the Prophus. What little plot there is concerns Roen training and fighting with the Prophus to ensure the survival of humanity, as the Genjix are only interested in using them as pawns.

The most obvious flaw in The Lives of Tao is plain poor writing. The prose, though not bad in isolation, is full of cliches, stock characters, and an egregious amount of telling instead of showing. For example, this is the second line of one of the later chapters:

It was late September and [Roen] had just returned from a two-week assignment - his most important and morally challenging assignment to date - and received new orders to come to the diner.

Sure would have been nice to actually see why it was so important and 'morally challenging...' This is perhaps the worst example, but the other instances are not far behind it; and there are more than I care to remember. The conversational dialogue is just as bad. I recall multiple times thinking to myself "no human people talk like this."

The greater structure of the novel also has problems. Roen's quest involves the discovery of Tao, learning about the Quasing's influence on history, training to become an agent of the Prophus, and finally joining the war effort against the Genjix. However, there is no palpable conflict to push these developments along. We get occasional glimpses of the Genjix's evil plans, but they are nebulous at best and the villain (Sean) is laughably archetypal. He gloats and thinks evil thoughts like some sort of Captain Planet villain. We do not see enough of Roen's duties to become invested in his character, nor do we receive enough detail about the Quasing's world to understand the stakes we have been introduced to. As a result, everything feels like filler. Scenes just happen so that exposition can be sprinkled in and we can move on. I realized about halfway through the book that I was still waiting for the plot to start. Most of the book is a stretched-out training montage.

Roen's character is also a big issue. When we first meet him he is an overweight loser with no ambitions or drive. He changes throughout the story, but only externally. He is physically fit and a competent shot by the end of the book, but his attitude and thoughts have not changed. He barely reacts to Tao's intrusion into his life, and is quick to get over most of the implications of the new world he finds himself in. He complains and whines on occasion, but never do we get a sense that this is happening to a real person. Roen is the most basic type of escapist fantasy: it's cool to be a secret agent, so of course he goes along with it. This is partially a result of the telling-not-showing: because we miss directly experiencing much of his growth we don't feel it happening. Perhaps he did agonize over the fact that he no longer has full bodily autonomy, or that most of human history is the result of aliens playing god, but we never see it because instead he needs to learn t'ai chi or how to shoot guns good. By the end, Roen is supposed to have transformed into James Bond, but he is more akin to Homer Simpson.

The only thing this book has in common with Bond is its abysmal portrayal of women. They are, like all other characters in this book, flat, stock, and static. Roen develops two love interests, Sonya, a fellow Prophus agent who helps train him, and Jill, a coworker from his programming job. All the women are introduced with a detailed physical description, of course, and things only get worse from there. Jill exists only to be Roen's main love interest. She has no character or function in the book beyond that. Sonya, at least, is competent in her own right, and does show more signs of having a characterization, but she exists primarily to bring tension to the romantic elements of the story. Roen has feelings for both of them, and that conflict is supposed to be a source of drama in the novel, but he has zero chemistry with either one of them (again, this is a result of much telling instead of showing). I felt like I was reading a high-school drama every time he interacted with either of them.

I wish I could say that this book's treatment of women was at least better than that of Stranger in a Strange Land but they are sadly close to the same. The climax of the story involves Roen attempting to save both Jill and Sonya from Sean, who has taken them hostage. He grievously wounds Sean, who has a Quasing of his own, but Sonya is also dying and Jill is incapacitated. If Sean dies, his Quasing will inhabit Jill (Sonya is already a host) and no doubt drive her mad. Roen is too injured to move them away, and so, to save Jill from that terrible fate, Tao and Sonya tell him he must kill Sonya before Sean expires. That way her Quasing can inhabit Jill and protect her from the evil Genjix. He goes through with it with much weeping, and Sonya's metaphorical (?) soul settles down into Jill's body.

Although I will admit it was a creative way to get both the girls, it's the kind of ludicrous scenario I would have expected out of a work of parody. But we are expected to be moved by it, to sympathize with Roen's emotional turmoil and be saddened by Sonya's sacrifice. The two women, underwritten as they are, have become literally interchangeable.

So far I have said very little about Tao; this is because he becomes irrelevant soon after he introduces Roen to the rest of the Prophus. In fact, The Quasing as a whole take a back seat to the secret-agent training, glossed-over missions, and attempts at office romance. We get a few nibbles of information about Tao's past lives at the start of each chapter, but they make up a few page's worth of words in total. Most of the book's central concept is unexplored and inconsequential. Human history is now just an endless string of 'aliens did it,' with no changes whatsoever to the real events. Tao's descriptions of his past hosts amount to little more than "Yeah I fucked up with Genghis Khan, but let me tell you, inventing t'ai chi was awesome." The implications that humanity's suffering and turmoil has been little more than puppetry goes mostly unaddressed, and, as I alluded to, nobody seems to fret too much out being bodily occupied by mind-reading aliens. The author has taken his premise and ignored its implications in favor of playing spy. And not even a very good spy

As it is now, the book reads like a first draft: whole swaths of significant character development are glossed over, the set up is ditched a fourth of the way in for attempts at drama and lame spy-movie action, and no character is dynamic or undergoes any real growth. Although I did not enjoy it much it was, at least, an easy book to read. It's like slightly stale popcorn: easy to consume, if you've got a bag right in front of you and nothing else to eat, but you'd never tell anybody to go out and get some of their own.

The Lives of Tao is available on Amazon in print, ebook, and audiobook formats.