From the Bookshelf of Constant Reader…

Chemistry

Weike Wang

Start date: November 15, 2019

Finish date: December 1, 2019

Discussion: Reading List

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Reading List

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What Members Thought

May 27, 2017 Tensy (bookdoyen) rated it liked it

Another MFA grad novel. Once again, the author plays with punctuation which drives me crazy! How did this happen? One summer day in a corn field in Iowa (or a crowded coffee shop in Boston, Wang got her MFA at BU), a group of MFArs meet and decide, "hey, let's play, and leave out quotation marks and start capitalizing words after a comma, not a period. Cool, right?" OK, rant over, but as I told my kids when they were pulling on the dog's tail...,"stop it, just stop it!"

The novel is in the first ...more

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Oct 20, 2019 Jane rated it really liked it

Shelves: family-story, psychology, recentfiction, coming-of-age-novel, immigrant-story

A strange, often hilarious, epigrammatic little book. It is about a young woman and her boyfriend who are both chemists. It is about her parents, who emigrated from China to America and lost their home. It is a book about culture and communication. How much her parents don't say, and how she learns to lose her own dreams to theirs. It is their dream that she be a chemist. She doesn't yet know what she wants to do, or who she wants to be with.

It's the writing that sparkles and sometimes makes me A strange, often hilarious, epigrammatic little book. It is about a young woman and her boyfriend who are both chemists. It is about her parents, who emigrated from China to America and lost their home. It is a book about culture and communication. How much her parents don't say, and how she learns to lose her own dreams to theirs. It is their dream that she be a chemist. She doesn't yet know what she wants to do, or who she wants to be with.

It's the writing that sparkles and sometimes makes me laugh out loud. The juxtaposition of scientific chemistry and sexual, personal chemistry creates all sorts of physical and psychological reactions.

It stops and starts to much for me...almost as if it could have been written on Twitter, but I was intrigued that the format worked as well as it did for me. Big contrast to my recent reread of Mrs. Dalloway.

I loved this book on second reading. And even more after the discussion on Constant Reader. We had an amazing discussion about whether the narrator was an unreliable narrator. It's true that the reader hears about everything through what she thinks and says. Here were my thoughts about that. Skip if you want to read for yourself first.

I've loved this discussion too. I've definitely trusted the narrator as I read Chemistry. She is clearly unwinding how her parents' lives, their emigration from China, her own childhood and her parents dreams/expectations for her have affected her feelings about not being a "successful enough" chemistry PhD candidate, about the danger of following Eric (which she definitely seems to rue by the end of the book) and about her fears of intimacy. Her therapy as well as her other efforts to unravel who she is (perhaps who any of us are) and what she wants, (not just what her parents want) form the heart of the book.

We do hear from her about her parents conversations, and actions...remember her father driving across the grass into the mailbox because her mother's car was blocking his exit. So of course, her parents words and actions are all filtered through the narrator's consciousness. It's what we all do as we try to figure out who we are aside from a collection of parental modeling and expectation and "drama." I think in the middle class childhood I had, my friends exerted a more important influence than my parents did...but parental influence was exerted so early. It's hard to tease out an "authentic" self. In fact, is there such a thing? I think Wang is also exploring that.

That said, each time I read, I found times when the short sections (the author, or perhaps an interviewer, calls this book a collage) put me off. I love long, evolving, beautifully written sentences. I read it for a second time, and began to savor the way paragraphs refract and bounce off of each other. The chemistry that the narrator is studying, the chemistry between this narrator and her partner, Eric, and the way in which the evolution of the self depends on so many actions and reactions (another kind of chemistry) began to dazzle me. On first reading, the novel felt clever, but too spare, as though I were reading tweets or insta-gram. I had to let the novel teach me how to read it.

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Sep 25, 2017 SooYoung rated it really liked it

Probably more like 4.5. It's a great, quick read--Wang's writing is short, punchy, perfect for our modern society who writes in acronyms and tweets. It's essentially a story about you mid 2os -- lost love, professional failure -- which I imagine, for nearly everyone, is pretty damn relatable.

"His career path is very straight, like that of an arrow to its target. If I were to draw my path out, it would like a gas particle flying around in space." p 9

"I find it interesting how often beauty is sho ...more

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Mar 19, 2020 Tammy rated it it was amazing

It felt so earnest and so heartfelt that I was genuinely surprised when I looked up the author and discovered it wasn’t autobiographical. The narrator disarms you with her whimsical humor and unpretentious prose, so that you don’t notice until you’re knee-deep in the novel that her life is falling apart at the seams. I appreciate that the novel deals with mental illness in a minority person, and how the narrator’s deep-seated love of science forms the backbone of this novel - far from being inac ...more

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Jul 10, 2017 Kate rated it really liked it

A nice read. A story of love, loss and understanding.

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Dec 14, 2019 Michelle rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction, constant-reader

Another book written in a sort of stream-of-consciousness style. There were many things about this book that I loved. I found the narrator to be very relatable. The parts talking about the Chinese culture and family were really interesting. The little snippets about her therapy sessions. Probably my favorite thing was her journey to understanding her parents. There were some truly touching parts at the end.

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