Elysha Chang’s debut novel, A Quitter’s Paradise (recently released in paperback), is populated by people who hold back—people who have made a tactic of restraint so that they might harbor a sense of safety. This is a way of self-preservation at work in Chang’s novel, a not-so-uncommon approach to being an immigrant, or a child of immigrants, thrown into the pitfalls of unfamiliar surroundings. The novel follows Eleanor Liu, a former Ph.D. candidate at Mount Sinai’s neuroscience program in New York City, who drops out while having to cope with the illness and eventual death of her mother. Even before her mother dies, Eleanor is already in a state of grief. She “swerves,” as Chang puts it. Eleanor is someone who is pained to the core, and her tactic for negotiating such a loss is withdrawal and, ultimately, the minimizing of herself. She constantly makes poor and almost infuriating and heartbreaking choices, leading her to one worrisome situation after another.
For one, Eleanor secretly gets married (on her twenty-fourth birthday) without telling her mother, a flashback to when her mother had been struggling with cancer. The program that Eleanor has dropped out of is the same Ph.D. program where her husband, Ellis, is a post-doc. No longer a doctoral student, she relegates herself to the role of Ellis’s lab tech, but still conducts her own unofficial series of experiments on mice, financed by her husband’s grant money, the results of which she will receive no credit for. Of her principal investigator at the lab, Eleanor tells us, “Penny, my former PI, frowns on this arrangement.” The present tense of this sentence early on in the novel reveals that it might still be true for Eleanor, perhaps for some time to come—a timeline that extends past the pages of the book. In the meantime, she embarks on a sexual affair with a colleague, her husband’s graduate student Samir, sometimes meeting him in the men’s bathroom at the lab. She may or may not have kidnapped one of the lab animals, housing the creature in her own home, to her neighbor’s horror. Why do this? “There’s a paradise on the other side of giving up,” Eleanor offers the reader, though she has difficulty making a case for it, which of course, only intensifies the narrative engine of the purgatory that has become her life.
The secrets people keep are another factor in a novel already plagued by bad behavior: secret marriages, affairs, stolen animals. Then pretend marriages. Caving to acts of desperation. Of the fire that Eleanor unwittingly starts in her lab, she says, “I thought it might be a secret we carry to our graves.” Eleanor does not even know that her mother has a boyfriend, Tommer, and that he will go on to offer a short eulogy and prayer at her mother’s funeral service, a funeral that neither her father nor sister will even attend, for reasons of their own. Secrets beget more secrets as the novel unravels—the ultimate secret, the complicated tapestry of the Liu family’s own history.
The hidden lives of the Liu family are paralleled in the novel’s structure of shifting perspectives and timeframes, which takes its own interesting evolution throughout the experience of reading: first person in Eleanor’s point of view juxtaposed with a third person omniscient narrator taking on the perspectives of the various members of Eleanor’s family, and even her extended family, all with their own histories and motivations and schemes for survival. The toggling between past and present and also points of view as the novel transitions between chapters offers more clues with each successive telling, and only complicates our understanding of Eleanor’s sense of self, or even what has been left unknown to her. We see forays into the study of relationships, following Eleanor’s parents, Jing and Rita, immigrating from Taipei, Taiwan, and ending up first in Elmhurst, Queens, and then finally settling in Sayreville, New Jersey. Eleanor’s relationship with Ellis. Her relationship to her parents, and their relationship to each other. Sisterly competition. Love affairs, including between Eleanor’s sister Narisa and Gabriel, a boy Narisa meets at a deli. Connecting all this, a tenderly handled story of immigration and its ramifications. Jing, Eleanor’s once handsome and full-of-potential father, who after having emigrated from Taiwan ends up selling wholesale goods (and not attending school, as he tells his family back in Taiwan)—cheap products that are described as “ephemeral.” Are the characters, too, meant to be ephemeral? In terms of who gets to belong and who gets to stay in the U.S., Chang writes, “Brother, half-brother, not-brother. Who cared? These migrants had such small designs. To eat, to live, to lie down on a bed. Was it a scam to ask for a day’s work and cash wages? To live and die in America?” “Scam” is an interesting word choice, as if to say that the act of belonging is only a brief performance.
The play with memory as a storytelling device is an important aspect for Chang, especially for the interconnected moments throughout the landscape of the novel. Who remembers what when so many of the characters in the novel withhold, almost as a means to forget and bury for good? Indeed, there is much left out—conversations, arguments, touchstones and hallmarks of lives, years of being together. One gets the feeling that so much has been repressed. Regarding Jing, we are told, “What had he dreamt of before dreaming of America, or some version of it? He both could and could not remember.” We are only offered slivers of understanding: “Over the years, Rita had gained such little knowledge of her daughters’ interior lives. They had grown into volatile, dreaming girls who behaved sometimes as if their eyes were closed, or turned inward toward unknowable things. What would they be like when they were grown? Where did they plan to go? She knew from the way they moved about the world—Narisa: roving and wraith-like, Eleanor: stiff and watchful—that they belonged elsewhere.” And then, when Eleanor says, “Do I call it a vision, a dream, or a memory?” Once more, it is Ellis who interrupts this liminal moment for Eleanor when they are in bed together, subverting intimacy, burying what could be, or what might have been.
Absence is another pervasive theme. The absences of family members, the absences of affection and of love, and the absence of a fuller understanding of one’s family lineage and history, and even place in the world. The absences in one’s own life too, leaving Eleanor to describe herself as merely “content,” never happy nor optimistic, even though, as Eleanor puts it at another point in the novel, “I am prone to wishful thinking,” which is best done, for Eleanor, in solitude. In addition to absence, the distance between loved ones features prominently in Eleanor’s anguish. She tells us, “My mother had a habit of ruining the things that I loved. Or, worse, the things I was just beginning to love.” Perhaps this is a sentiment that many children of immigrants are familiar with—the misalignment of good intentions in favor of the betterment of one’s apparent station in life. Of Samir, Eleanor reflects, “That sudden swerve into deference—a hallmark of the son of immigrant parents—was comforting to me.” In contrast, as a significant other, Ellis is hair-pulling in his inability to connect more meaningfully with Eleanor. She tells us, “I felt myself opening toward a new way of being. Ellis’s way.” In fact, it is often Ellis who gets his way in the relationship. And what does Eleanor get? Further disappointment. Ellis doesn’t reciprocate this opening up in any meaningful way. He could almost be in conversation with the Harold character from Amy Tan’s 1989 novel The Joy Luck Club, who at best, lacks tact and finesse and any inkling of charisma. At worst, he may cause a kind of damage in a significant other that cannot be rectified. This is a type who is oblivious to the private hurts of their other half. When Eleanor feels worried, Ellis only says to her, “That’s just what love feels like.” And then before allowing her to answer he says, “I feel it too.” What else can Eleanor do but withdraw once more and turn further inward?
We don’t get much interaction between Ellis and Eleanor’s parents, or even vice versa (except for a brief mention of how Ellis’s mother took the news of his secret wedding to Eleanor with joy—an opposite reaction to Eleanor’s own mother), despite the fact that Ellis has “lots of energy,” and travels routinely for work, and is often quite social, speaking almost too easily with waiters at restaurants, and prone to over-sharing. We only have a moment where Ellis is mentioned as being present for Mrs. Liu’s funeral, but certainly not someone who is a comfort to Eleanor. Furthermore, other distances between loved ones manifest in the novel. The distance between Eleanor and her father, their inability to communicate properly. Eleanor’s sister, Narisa, once a kind of bully to Eleanor, who then disappears to the point of being described as dead. Eleanor’s complicated feelings toward Jiajia, a relative who goes on to become her mother’s caretaker in the last moments of Rita’s life. Later Eleanor will ask, “Is this love? Waiting, patience, forgiveness? It feels as if it’s all a language I recognize but never learned to speak.”
A Quitter’s Paradise is the first book under Sarah Jessica Parker’s new imprint, SJP Lit with Zando Books, following the successes of the Sex and the City plus And Just Like That . . . star and book-lover’s previous shepherding of literary novels for Hogarth Press, which included Fatima Farheen Mirza’s A Place for Us, where themes of love and family are also prevalent, and beautiful language and sentence-driven narratives are at the heart of its storytelling. Elysha Chang’s debut comes as a fitting installment in Parker’s renewed literary enterprise. And yet, as I was reading A Quitter’s Paradise, I thought of how the novel could also be a testament to something else—perhaps to the instances in our larger lives when relatability falls short, and when circumstances force us to cast a wider net. And then there are the moments in our everyday interactions with each other where we can find ourselves pushing back against the current of commonality and agreement, in order to discover what other kinds of tensions and possibilities might arise and refine and deepen our knowledge of the world around us. Perhaps this is why Eleanor resists relatability too—why she “swerves.” Perhaps this is why Eleanor chooses unwisely, perhaps even as a way of shocking herself back into an existence that is already beyond the reach of her own understanding. Does she still have the capacity to be moved by something still unknown to her? That which has evaded her own experience? And can she be convinced by, or even seduced to reconsider, her singular perspective? Especially during times of grief? Self-discovery is the experiment that Eleanor is conducting on herself—and surprise is her chemical reagent. And relatability comes as something of a dissonance for her. For instance, her sister and mother look for their images as a kind of confirmation of their being. But for Eleanor, this kind of confirmation isn’t enough. She doesn’t trust the image either. She doesn’t trust what she sees in the mirror. As if in recitative, she tells us, “Listening for something means you’re already hearing some version of it.” In contrast, preaching to the choir—a call and answer in what seems to be the echo chamber of an already emptying cathedral, is a lost cause, and in Eleanor’s case, she is already lost.
Quiet, tension-filled, meticulous—a serious piece of literature, tackling issues of grief and mourning, as well as self-discovery—A Quitter’s Paradise is a purposeful study, and Chang is a writer with a finger on the pulse of these themes.
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A Quitter’s Paradise. By Elysha Chang. New York: Zando–SJP Lit, 2023. 304 pp. $17.00.
