A Quitter's Paradise

It's giving living in limbo

I love how libraries pick up books of debut authors and display them on shelves around the libraries. Sure, I’m sure there are books that make the circuit on social media and book tours, but books get published everyday that never make the rounds on social media. So thank you again to the local library for putting this on the display shelf. Because it sounded intriguing and I’m a simple girl. I like to look at the covers rather than the spine.

Summary:

Eleanor is in a tricky predicament. Her mother had passed away. Her family is estranged. She quit her PhD program. She’s studying mice that she isn’t supposed to have. She’s pregnant. She is in a unsatisfying relationship with her husband Ellis. She’s cheating on him with a colleague, Samir.

But in all of the confusion, we are also exploring her parent’s relationship, their time in America, and her sister’s disappearance they did nothing about. We also get a glimpse of the working conditions in the factory that her parents run and what that was like for their workers. There is also an exploration of the relationship between the family as a stilted and frustrated tapestry which seems to reflect and bleed into Eleanor’s situation. Unsure of what to do and frustrated with everything, she decides to act out in unexplainable ways and try to reckon with her own self, to no avail.

Told in a non-linear style, this novel takes us….you know I’m not sure where it takes me. Let’s explore that in the next section.

The thoughts section:

I think this book left me very confused at the end of it all.

Even now I’m still trying to process what the author was trying to say in this book.

Was she saying something about the mental health of Asian Americans? Eleanor seems to be having a mid-life crisis. She has lived her life so that she doesn’t come in conflict with anyone in her family. Her identity is tied up with being the scholar of the family. A teacher of hers recommended the science fair and she just never stopped. She didn’t like to engage in all the family discussions because she couldn’t really trust her parents on how they would react. She lived her life so quietly and so non-confrontationally that she couldn’t begin to create her own opinion. She never once could figure out what she wanted because at the end of the day she didn’t know. Which caused a lot of confusion for the people around her because she was trying to constantly figure out how people wanted her to be rather than figuring out what she wanted herself. I’m surprised that the character didn’t just spontaneously combust at the end. All the characters we meet in this book need emotional help. But I suppose they were all trying to grit their teeth until they shatter.

Was she saying something about the American dream? There is something to be said about her family’s rags to riches story on paper. They were from a small village in China, pooled the resources to send one of their own to the US and then made a small fortune for themselves with a house by the river and a factory to call their own. But what was the cost? The cost seems to be the estrangement of both of their daughters, a broken relationship that was built only on the acquisition of resources, and the fracturing of families who risked everything to be in the US only to be caught and deported. So was it worth it?

At the end of the day, this story was really confusing and by the end of the book I felt like I was dropped off at the curb next to a highway. The main character’s inaction was actually so frustrating to watch. She was all over the place in terms of how she made sense of the world. She avoided everything and ended up not making any decisions at all. The book was trying to say something but the question is what. I still am not really sure.

Would not recommend personally. It was not a hard read or anything like that, but it’s just worth reading something else.

Much love and I hope to bring something more ✨enriching✨ next week xoxo