Ebook Assessment
One thing Near Nothing
By Tom Pyun
Bywater Books: 250 pages, $19.95
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I like debut novels that really feel filled with each thought an writer has been ready to specific. Tom Pyun’s “One thing Near Nothing” seems like a type of books. It begins because the story of a homosexual couple’s tragicomic surrogacy journey however then expands into far more.
It’s no spoiler to inform you that one half of the couple, Wynn, bolts earlier than the child is even born. And once I say bolts, I imply he bodily runs out of the airport and leaves his accomplice, Jared, moments earlier than they’re meant to board a flight to Cambodia for the beginning of their daughter, whom they plan to call Meryl after the award-winning actress. That memorable scene units up many extra jaw-dropping plot twists.
Advised via Wynn‘s and Jared’s alternating factors of view, it is a stressed novel about stressed individuals whose American goals are not often glad. Pyun takes us to San Francisco, Cambodia, Thailand, Connecticut, New York, Switzerland, Boston and Kenya. He begins the story in 2015 however takes us way back to 1995 and as far into the longer term as 2036, all in a slim and breathless 250 pages. It is a novel that strikes quick.
Generally I felt the ebook moved too quick, that its plot twists had been resolved earlier than they’d time to totally unravel. The ebook shines brightest when it lingers within the messes its characters create, and when it takes time to look at their passions and fears. Wynn’s love of dance, for instance, is written with affected person complexity. Early on, he describes his capability “to disassociate and undergo the motions when wanted” — what a method to arrange a personality who later abandons his life to chase his thirst for dance, which is all about “the unbridled pleasure of being in my physique.” On this novel, dance is the other of disassociation. It’s freedom, group, belonging — a refuge, particularly for Wynn, a personality in a state of fixed movement who declares early on that he doesn’t “wish to really feel empty anymore.”
Crucially for the story Pyun is telling, Wynn needs to be a hip-hop dancer. He describes hip-hop as “resistance, particularly throughout the white supremacist capitalist patriarchy that we reside in.” The novel excels when exploring the position this patriarchy performs in shaping each characters’ views of themselves and their world. Wynn, a Korean American born and raised in Connecticut, spent his first 18 years being “routinely assaulted and ignored, generally on the identical day,” by classmates and residents of his hometown. He makes two guarantees to himself when he graduates school, one being that he “wouldn’t find yourself with a white man.” In an excellent second of introspection, he later says, “The deadly flaw of this contract was its rooting within the adverse. As they are saying, ‘When you don’t construct your dream, somebody will rent you to construct theirs.’”
And so, Wynn does find yourself with a white man … one he finally runs away from within the airport. And Jared is not only any white man, however one who imagines a future the place Wynn’s escape turns into an anecdote for his or her dinner visitors, “a well-to-do, racially various mixture of middle-aged, straight, and homosexual skilled {couples}.”
I ought to observe that I’m an Iranian American homosexual husband and father who was gifted our beloved kids via surrogacy. I do know from my teen years as an immigrant on this nation what it feels prefer to be each assaulted and ignored on the identical day. I do know too what it means to search out freedom, group and belonging via the humanities. I additionally perceive the distinctive stress of eager to be an ideal instance of parenthood in a world that also views queer mother and father with suspicion. There have been moments on this novel the place I cheered its knowledge and humor (the ebook could be very, very humorous, by no means extra so than once we lastly meet Wynn and Jared’s surrogate), and moments the place I cringed at how egocentric its important characters are in regard to their dedication as mother and father.
It’s not till the acknowledgments, the place Pyun thanks the queer associates who shared their surrogacy journeys with him, that we hear a constructive story of queer parenthood. He writes, “The happiness of your households made poor fodder for the juicy novel I so desperately needed to jot down.” Wynn and Jared don’t exist to characterize excellent depictions of queerness. They exist to point out us that queer parents-to-be may be simply as tousled, conflicted and impulsive as any others. Wynn is perhaps the one who bodily runs away from parenthood and prays their surrogate modifications her thoughts or miscarries, however Jared is an equally unprepared guardian who at one level thinks of leaving the child himself to start out over “with a California-based surrogate this time.”
In the end, it is a novel concerning the darkly hilarious facet of our never-satisfied American goals. What feels most American about it’s how stuffed it’s with concepts and power, with rage and hope, with rash and egocentric choices that go away chaos and harm of their wake.
As Individuals contemplate our most up-to-date existential election and a number of world crises that ought to encourage us to face our complicity in shaping an unjust world, “One thing Near Nothing” asks some large questions of us in addition to of its characters: Will we run away from our tasks to others? Can we really assist another person once we haven’t but examined and accepted ourselves? And maybe most essential: Ought to we title our subsequent baby after Meryl Streep?
Abdi Nazemian is a author whose books embrace the Stonewall Honor recipient “Like a Love Story” and the Stonewall Award- and Lambda Literary Award-winning “Solely This Lovely Second.”
