 (Penguin Random House) Around this time two years ago, I used this newsletter to recommend that you check out Kevin Kwan’s delicious novel “Crazy Rich Asians,” about a New York University economics professor who goes on vacation with her boyfriend to visit his family in Singapore and is stunned to learn that he’s from one of the richest dynasties in the world. Since this is Memorial Day weekend, and I hope many of you have long stretches of beaching, barbecuing or general lounging ahead of you, and because the final novel in the trilogy that began with “Crazy Rich Asians,” “Rich People Problems,” was released this week, I thought I would circle around and recommend that you read all three if you haven’t already. “Rich People Problems” and its antecedents (the second book in the trilogy is called “China Rich Girlfriend“) are marketed as “women’s fiction,” which strikes me as a bummer as that designation almost always does. The gender split in Kwan’s novels is roughly even, and though they’re concerned with social and economic stratification, social positioning and what happens when gender roles intersect with vast armadas of money, often expressed through marriage plots, there’s nothing about them that codes as particularly male or female. Instead, “Rich People Problems” and its predecessors have become some of my favorite comfort re-reads because Kwan is so good at reminding us how every detail of luxury consumption, marriage and friendships can get tangled up in politics, class and otherwise. His characters are constantly debating the ethics of their couture clothes, worrying about how scandals might affect a turnover in Chinese party leadership, trying to define or destroy the distinctions between old and new money and grappling with questions of racism in a society defined by immigration and cultural fusion. And when they aren’t doing it, Kwan is commenting on everything they’re doing in a series of sharp, funny footnotes that have become one of the hallmarks of the series. In other words, slotting fiction into narrow categories based on preconceptions of what men and women like to read is dumb. Kwan’s “Crazy Rich Asians,” “China Rich Girlfriend” and “Rich People Problems” are a lot of fun. I hope you have some nice libations and tasty food over this weekend, and I’ll see you back on Act Four late on Sunday with your regularly scheduled “Silicon Valley” recap. |
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