Chemistry

March 20, 2017
A clipped, funny, painfully honest narrative voice lights up Wang’s debut novel about a Chinese-American graduate student who finds the scientific method inadequate for understanding her parents, her boyfriend, or herself. The optimist sees the glass as half-full, the pessimist half-empty, explains the narrator, while a chemist sees it as half-liquid, half-gaseous, probably poisonous. At 27, this aspiring chemist has reached a point in her research at which, seeing no progress, her thesis advisor suggests changing topics. Instead, she has a breakdown in the lab, smashing beakers and shouting until security guards are called. Her romantic relationship also reaches a turning point when her boyfriend takes a job out of state. The thought of relocation elicits the narrator’s unhappy memories of her family’s emigration from Shanghai to Detroit when she was five: her father learned English, worked hard, became an engineer, but her mother, a pharmacist in China, never quite adapted. Caught between parents, languages, and cultures, the narrator devotes herself to academic study. Only after her best friend has a baby does she begin to comprehend love, the one power source, according to Einstein, man has never mastered. Wang offers a unique blend of scientific observations, Chinese proverbs, and American movie references. In spare prose, characters remain unnamed, except for boyfriend Eric and the baby, nicknamed “Destroyer.” Descriptions of the baby’s effect on adults and adults’ effect on a dog demonstrate Wang’s gift for perspective—the dog’s, the chemist’s, the immigrant parents, and, most intimately, their bright, quirky, conflicted daughter.

Wang's short novel is about growing up and finding your own way. It's funny and warm and well performed by Julia Whelan. The unnamed narrator is a Ph.D. candidate in chemistry who is realizing that maybe she's not all that into chemistry. She has a patient boyfriend, a best friend, and immigrant Chinese parents who war at marriage and push her hard to greater achievements. Whelan's tone is perfect. She generally plays it straight, an interested observer of the unnamed character's own life. By not overdramatizing the serious parts of the book, or giddying up the humor, Whelan lets both stand on their own, which they are strong enough to do. G.S.D. � AudioFile 2017, Portland, Maine