Review | Debut novel of extraordinary promise, tale of Chinese in Alaska seen through a child’s eyes has echoes of Virginia Woolf
- In The Unpassing, San Francisco-based Chia-Chia Lin creates a shadowy world, rich in imagery, atmosphere, and the arbitrariness of life in an unfamiliar place
- Characters are well drawn but plotting is weak in what is an outstandingly evocative literary novel whose prose is accomplished and use of metaphor powerful
The Unpassing by Chia-Chia Lin, pub. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 3.5/5 stars
The Unpassing comes unusually garlanded for a debut novel, with back-cover blurbs offering high praise from four authors. And first impressions are favourable, with author Chia-Chia Lin skilfully creating an intense, image-rich world.
Events unfold in a hardscrabble village near Anchorage, in the American state of Alaska, in the 1980s, and the wilderness features prominently, setting a psycho-geographical tone. The story is narrated by 10-year-old Gavin, the second of four children in a family of struggling migrants from Taiwan (the others are big sister Pei-Pei, younger sister Ruby and little brother Natty). Gavin’s perceptions colour the narrative and largely dictate the approach of the novel.
The premise of The Unpassing is simple: a family of migrants livesin Alaska, where the educated father (neither parent is named) finds work as a plumber and a contractor. Almost immediately, tragedy strikes, when Gavin and Ruby contract meningitis. Gavin recovers but Ruby dies. The family struggles with grief, financial difficulties and dislocation. The father gets into legal trouble, with harsh financial implications and aftershocks for the family.
Lin possesses a talent for powerful metaphors: the oil pipeline is a “black steel artery”, the sky “turned drab, as though mixed with ash”. She describes “new, dismal clothes” in a cheap shop, a trailer with brown grocery bags taped to the windows in lieu of curtains, a clock that “sliced the silence into uniform lengths”, and the way the children “liked to haunt this spot” in the woods.
