Beauty Plus Pity
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5.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
"Beauty plus pity—that is the closest we can get to a definition of art."
—Vladimir Nabokov
In this tragicomic, modern immigrant's tale, Malcolm Kwan is a twentysomething Asian American embarking on a modeling career whose life is derailed when his father dies and his fiancée leaves him. When he meets the half-sister he never knew existed—the result of his father's extramarital affair—he must work through his lifelong ambivalence as one trapped between two cultures and between two parents holding intolerable secrets.
Kevin Chong is the author of the novel Baroque-a-Nova (Plume) and the memoir Neil Young Nation (Greystone Books).
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Chong (Baroque-a-Nova) imbues the hero of his second novel with a healthily self-deprecating sense of humor, which in varying degrees succeeds in saving this coming-of-age saga from tedium. Malcolm Kwan is a second-generation Chinese-American who has just lost his father, Oliver, to cancer. At the wake, Dad's love child and Malcolm's half-sister, Hadley, sits in a corner, adding to the grief of Malcolm's emotionally unstable mother, Eliza, and generally upsetting the solemnity of the situation. While Malcolm deals with all the usual identity crises of the newly fatherless, he is also gearing up for pursuing a career in modeling, not so much a lifelong as a dim but insistently held desire. His fianc e, Claire, tired of his equally dim desire for her, leaves Malcolm and their shared apartment, conveniently making available space for a blossoming sibling relationship between Malcolm and Hadley. Hadley's adolescent dramas prove to be a much needed foil to Malcolm's self-absorbed, antisocial tendencies, and he discovers in her a surprising side of himself and of his father. This unassuming, well-written novel is quiet in every way subtly entertaining, poignant, and funny but suffers from its lack of passion.
