Pick a Color
A Novel
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3.8 • 16 Ratings
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
WINNER OF THE GILLER PRIZE
A USA Today Bestseller
From O. Henry Award winner and two-time Giller Prize winner Souvankham Thammavongsa comes a revelatory novel about loneliness, love, labor, and class, an intimate and sharply written book following a nail salon owner as she toils away for the privileged clients who don't even know her true name.
“I live in a world of Susans. I got name tags for everyone who works at this nail salon, and on every one is printed the name 'Susan.'"
Ning is a retired boxer, but to the customers who visit her nail salon, she is just another worker named Susan. On this summer's day, much like any other, the Susans buff and clip and polish and tweeze. They listen and smile and nod. But beneath this superficial veneer, Ning is a woman of rigorous intellect and profound complexity. A woman enthralled by the intricacy and rhythms of her work, but also haunted by memories of paths not taken and opportunities lost. A woman navigating the complex power dynamics among her fellow Susans, whose greatest fears and desires lie just behind the gossip they exchange.
As the day's work grinds on, the friction between Ning's two identities—as anonymous manicurist and brilliant observer of her own circumstances—will gather electric and crackling force, and at last demand a reckoning with the way the world of privilege looks at a woman like Ning.
Told over a single day with razor-sharp precision and wit, Pick a Color confirms Souvankham Thammavongsa's place as literature's premier chronicler of the immigrant experience, in its myriad, complex, and slyly subversive forms.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
A world-weary salon manager reflects on her clients and herself in this witty novel that’s as sharp as a pair of nail clippers. Ning, an ex-boxer turned nail salon owner, runs a tight shop—all her employees wear name badges that say “Susan” and they’re all expected to look virtually indistinguishable from each other. But despite the restrictions, the Susans find time to laugh and gossip about their clients’ idiosyncrasies. Author Souvankham Thammavongsa’s smart and acerbic writing reveals so much about Ning’s life, desires, and feelings, all while prompting us to contemplate the source of her deeper troubles. We can sense some of her previous difficulties while reading, but Thammavongsa purposely leaves us to ponder everything from the same distance that Ning keeps from her own pain. With warmth, humor, and wry insight, this is a fascinating character study.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Thammavongsa, author of the Giller-winning story collection How to Pronounce Knife, crafts a stunning portrait of a solitary woman. Ning, a "family of one" at 42, lives in a small apartment above her nail salon, which she opened five years earlier, after she was let go by another salon, ostensibly due to her age but perhaps because things got too complicated with one of the owners, Rachel ("I don't want to grow old with you," Rachel told her after 12 years of working together). Though Ning avoids getting too close to her employees, she enjoys bantering with them, exchanging bawdy and sometimes macabre jokes in their unnamed Tai language about their unsuspecting English-speaking clients ("We ought to take him to the back room.... Cut him up, you know," says one of her employees after a client asks for a happy ending). Ning's reflections on her long-ago stint as an amateur boxer hint at the source of the novel's somber tone, as she remembers putting an opponent in a coma, but Thammavongsa offers no easy answers to the cause of Ning's torment. Instead, she invites the reader to consider the barbed perspective of a woman on the outside looking in. Readers won't easily forget this deeply intelligent narrative.
