Ellie Huang has lived in focused pursuit of traditional markers of success. She earned good grades in college and then enrolled in Stanford Law and excelled there, too. While in law school, she met Ian, a golden boy whose good looks were widely appreciated. Ian wasn’t the best student—Ellie quickly learned to downplay her successes to avoid outshining him—but his considerable charms carried him through law school. After graduation, Ellie snagged a prestigious clerkship in Washington, D.C., but as soon as it ended, she returned to Ian’s side. They married, and she continued to meet expectations, playing the model minority while working long hours as an attorney.
As You Can’t Stay Here Forever opens, Ian’s death in a car crash, only months after their wedding, shakes Ellie loose. She learns that Ian had been cheating on her with one of her colleagues. Ellie confronts the other woman, berating her with an outpouring of anger—behavior that’s certainly justified but also out of sync with Ellie’s carefully orchestrated life. Returning to normalcy seems impossible; Ellie can’t focus on the law anymore, so she cashes in Ian’s life insurance and flees the country with her best friend, Mable Chou, in tow. But against the lush backdrop of the French Riviera, Ellie’s inner turmoil is even uglier.
Debut novelist and San Francisco attorney Katherine Lin examines expectations and disappointment in You Can’t Stay Here Forever. In Ellie, she has created a character defined by insecurities, angst and a palpably tense interior landscape. As much as some readers may dislike Ellie, it’s clear that her own self-loathing is just as strong. Ellie thinks uncharitably about Mable because she refuses to live by the rules that have guided Ellie’s life, and she is equally scornful of her mother, who was never at ease with Ian. An American couple at the resort, Robbie and Fauna, also draw Ellie’s ire. Fauna, an older, wealthier and thrice-divorced white woman, holds power over her Asian American boyfriend that parallels the power that Ian, also white, held over Ellie.
Lin laces observations about racial, gender and other power dynamics throughout, but the plot still moves swiftly enough to make the novel a vacation read. Just as with its protagonist, there’s much more to see if you’re willing to read between the lines.
