Kenneth Champeon

A novel about terse men with guns will inevitably summon comparisons to Hemingway. One set in the South will likewise invoke Faulkner and Cormac McCarthy. The Son by Philipp Meyer has its Hemingway-esque motifs; scenes of scalpings and general rapine do recall McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. Meanwhile, Meyer’s decision to write using different voices riffs on Faulkner’s stylistic experiments.

At times Meyer does seem to be aping these predecessors, but his latest book is no mere homage. This talented young writer—one of the New Yorker’s “20 under 40”—has his own voice, and it owes as much perhaps to Virginia Woolf as to the male American canon.

The Son concerns several generations of Texans: Eli McCullough, his son Peter and Peter’s granddaughter Jeanne Anne. Eli’s tale, told in straight narrative, is set before and during the Civil War. Peter’s, told in diary form, centers on the Great War. J.A.’s, told in interior monologue, spans the latter 20th century.

The most compelling of these characters is Eli, who watches Comanches murder his family and then is taken captive by them. Years pass, and he becomes accustomed to their independent ways, so that even after his so-called liberation, Eli pines for his adoptive people.

Peter’s main struggle is with the Mexicans who once owned the Lone Star State. He witnesses Mexicans being massacred, and when one survivor calls him to account, he must choose between his love for her and his duty to a family who scorns the “wetbacks.”

For J.A., the problem is how to carry on the family name in a completely masculinized culture (women, Eli had said, “had no common sense”). She also struggles with her Texan pride, given that her nation, rather than being grateful for the state’s once indispensable oil production (“life as they knew it did not exist without Texas”), treats her kind with chilly Yankee superiority. On top of that, J.A. is a McCullough, and her ancestors’ enemies remember.

Meyer writes with grace, if not economy, and always with great sympathy, only occasionally careening into the saccharine. His knowledge of Comanche folkways is admirable, and, unlike Hemingway, he can write convincing women.

The novel’s epigraph is from Gibbon, and so its overarching theme is ephemerality—the decline of families shadowed by the decline of empires—a theme evident as well in the title of Meyer’s previous work, American Rust. The Son is a shining second step in a promising career.

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Read a Q&A with Philipp Meyer for The Son.

Simply put, The Hamilton Case by Sri Lankan author Michelle de Kretser is one of the most extraordinary novels I have ever read. Set in 1930s Sri Lanka—then called Ceylon and a colony of Britain—de Krester's second novel is captivating, intelligent, erudite and devilishly funny. It is not in the poetic style of fellow Sri Lankan Michael Ondaatje. Nor, despite the claim on the book's back cover, does it resemble Rohinton Mistry's A Fine Balance, which displays more sweep but less virtuosity. De Kretser wastes not a word, and her wit is rapier sharp.

The novel's title would suggest that it is a detective story, and it is, in part, as details come to light about the murder scandal that haunts the once wealthy and influential Obeysekere family. But the novel focuses largely on the evolution of that family. Sam, the lawyer son. Maud, the dissolute mother. Claudia, sister to Sam and wife of Sam's main adversary, Jaya. In later life, Jaya takes up the dubious cause of reserving Sri Lanka for the Sinhalese against the recently arrived Tamils. The author compares such tactics to the divide et impera program of the British Empire.

Sri Lanka is a melting pot due to its role in trade between Europe and the Far East. Sam even suggests that "there's not a Ceylonese without mongrel blood in his veins." But the island is fraught with ethnic tension. Like the case in Forster's A Passage to India, the Hamilton case is complicated by issues of racial inequality. Meanwhile the novel's native characters are generally more English than the English.

One of the novel's more pleasing diversions is the waging of what Martin Amis has called "the war against cliché." Both Maud and a Tamil named Shivanathan are guilty of composing hackneyed phrases and images. De Kretser spears them mercilessly, while displaying her skill in producing fresh analogies ("he had the air of an aggrieved rodent"). Indeed, perhaps the most impressive thing about The Hamilton Case is simply how beautifully it makes the English language sing.

Kenneth Champeon writes from Thailand.

Monique Truong's debut novel, The Book of Salt, is narrated by a Vietnamese man named Binh who serves as the personal cook for those sapphic luminaries Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. The primary setting is Paris; the time, the 1930s, when things began to go seriously awry.

In an elegant if rambling style somewhat reminiscent of Stein herself, Truong relates Binh's rise from obscurity to semi-obscurity. The son of a hateful, alcoholic, but devoutly Catholic father and a long-suffering, devoted mother, Binh begins his culinary career in the Governor-General's mansion in Saigon. Later, as a lost soul in the Paris of the Lost Generation, he answers an ad placed by "Two American ladies," whom Binh addresses as GertrudeStein (a one-word appellation) and Miss Toklas. What follows is a truly mouth-watering cascade of food preparations and displays.

In its celebration of gustatory delights and their use as metaphors for human life, Truong's novel belongs in the company of such books as Joanne Harris' Chocolat. Compared to a soufflé, says Binh, "A tart is better, uncomplicated, in the wrong hands even a bit rough. Like an American boy, I would imagine."

Despite Leo Stein's tenable appraisal of his sister's prose as "nothing more than babble," the two women inhabit a world of extreme aestheticism and popularity. In contrast, Binh lives on the fringes as an asiatique, and gay to boot. Indeed, and perhaps implausibly, Binh has a brief encounter with no less than the future Ho Chi Minh. He drinks excessively and wanders around Paris so much that he memorizes its arrondissements. And when the Steins eventually return to America, they leave Binh as well as their two dogs, Pépé and Basket behind.

Born in Saigon and now a New Yorker, Truong capably evokes Binh's disparate worlds, and her depiction of the eccentric, punctilious and almost intolerably narcissistic American ladies rings true. Somewhat less convincing is her ambitious persona as a gay man: one often hears Truong, not Binh, when the writing soars into sentimentality or sensuality. And for a man of such reticence, Binh's inner life is almost incredibly elaborate.

But there is perhaps no place so romantic as colonial Indochina or antebellum Paris, and by the end of The Book of Salt one hungers desperately for both. And perhaps even more, one hungers for one of Binh's extraordinary repasts.

Kenneth Champeon, a writer living in Thailand, is a regular contributor to ThingsAsian.com.