What do readers think of Activities of Daily Living by Lisa Hsiao Chen? Write your own review.

Fellow readers, this is a UNIQUE novel, one that is extremely difficult to review, but one that I recommend to those who appreciate an author's skill with the interweaving of two stories. The research that led up to publication must have been grueling! How to combine Alice, her sister, and her father's decline into dementia with the far-fetched projects of Tehching Hsich is the task.

I can guarantee if you wish to see writing skill demonstrated, read this and do not miss the author's citations on the last page.

In as much as I found this novel relatable, specifically the witnessing a parent’s end of life as I have been through it, I would have been okay with just the caring of a dying loved one. There are two different stories happening and in as much as I tried to see the parallel, I personally related to the end of life journey of the stepfather. That part of the novel carried more weight for me than the project of the artist.Because of personal bias, favoring this story, I find it difficult to review. There are times I thought the storyline wandered and meandered, like when the French author Simone de Beauvoir was mentioned and there was an entire almost two pages about her “The coming of age”. I found myself researching this author and being curious about her work… this took me away from focusing on the story. In other words, the author did not do a good enough job to keep me “hooked”. If it was not for the stepfather and his mental decline, I don’t known how much this novel will have kept me reading. All in all, the stepfather’s experience in nursing homes and all the safety nets or lack thereof I totally experienced with a love one and that was realistic and relatable.

There is no real plot to this book other than the suspense we all live with day to day to see what tomorrow will bring.
There are two simultaneous stories going on here: Adult stepchildren taking care of an aging stepfather and the difficulty that brings. Remembering "what was" and merging that with "what is", heartbreaking at times; and the activities of daily living that everyone has in their life. The most mundane tasks are amplified and reflected upon. The things we do by reflex and don't give much thought to, well, they all take time, and they all must be done. We are all coping with what we need to do.
This book heightens awareness of what is required.

The writer Ms. Lisa Hsiao Chen leaves no doubt in the reader's mind of her mastery over the New York artists scene. The whole book deals with pulls and pressures that conflict her very existence. The pull of her ancestry but the fears surrounding her ignorance of all its aspects. The pull of an artists excitement but her fears and insecurity that lead her to live her dreams through another artist. The pull of her wide episodic knowledge of the artiste's scene in New York but her inability to edit her knowledge into an effective commentary. Ms. Chen evidently is very knowledgeable on the general scene around the artists in New York and every aspect that is linked with it. Where she comes short, in my view, is to pull together the family angle and her career angle into a more holistic account. The reader is left tired jumping from one disjointed chapter to the other. The book will no doubt make an impact on a tiny, much younger section of New Yorkers with similar proclivities and tuned in more accurately to the city's particularities. However, it is possible that it will fail to grasp and keep the attention of all ethnicities and ages. The main reason is that the bond between the reader and the writer, so essential for universal acclaim, fails to make its presence at any point.

In this book, Ms. Chen takes the reader on a thought provoking journey into diverse paths which involve how two different people - one factual and one fictional - use their lives to illustrate the concepts of life and time.

Her main character, Alice, creates a project (term used in the book) to immerse herself in the actual performance art of Tehching Hsieh (referred to as the Artist) whose art consists of a series of year long performances where he is the only actor in a series of unusual activities (which I thought bizarre) where he totally disengages himself from any distractions or activities and faces total isolation. His "Cage Piece" involved him building a cage in his apartment outfitted with only a bed and slop bucket. It is devoid of any distractions like TV, radio, etc. and he engages in no activities. His friend provides him with daily sustenance and empties his slop bucket. No conversation is exchanged and his friend takes random photographs of the Artist during this caged period.

Alice is concurrently acting as primary caregiver to her Taiwanese stepfather (referred to as Father) who is sinking into the abyss of dementia.

I found this a very difficult read. When discussing the Artist, Ms. Chen makes extensive references to various famous artists, authors and philosophers who were unfamiliar to me. I decided to research some of these people so that correlations/parallels to the Artist and Alice's experiences would become clearer. However, it increased my confusion, caused frustration and diverted my reading time. My research did garner my interest in these individuals, particularly the Artist himself.

Ms. Chen's writing style was also difficult since there wasn't any fluidity between chapters, characters were randomly included but not thoroughly introduced and she sporadically used different writing styles. There were elements of the novel that were well done like her experiences with her Father since they are relatable to anyone dealing with the aging process. She also exhibited significant knowledge of her references.

This is not a novel that I would intentionally choose. I think it is better suited to readers who are more familiar with art, particularly performance art, or who have an abstract or philosophical persuasion.

There is a disconnect between many of the chapters of this novel. After reading it straight through, I then went back to read a chapter at a time but not in order and the story still read the same. Many of the chapters were intense and complete in themselves as a short story would be and others left me wondering how it even pertained to the storyline.
Life is definitely about multitasking and Alice was a pro. Her ability to manage her life, the life and demise of her Father and the Artist's life. Throughout the story we are introduced to varied characters that interact with Alice and then there is the constant interjection of authors, movie titles, book references and quotes. At times the novel seems to be a jumble of random thoughts without a consistent thread. I may try again, or maybe this just wasn't my type of book.

I found this a difficult book. There are two main threads. One tells about The Artist, the life and accomplishments of a Chinese immigrant that is a performance artist. The second tells of The Father who is slowly walking the path to dementia and death. Time and it's boundaries and vagaries seems to bind them together. I related to the story of the father as I am on the same path and have a loving daughter to guide me. This was beautifully written and insightful. At other times I felt confused and irritated at the bombardment of extraneous material and name dropping. Was this the authors expectation?
Once I start a book I am compelled to finish it. For the reader that needs the story to 'grab" them in the first fifty pages, This book is not for you.

?I have mixed feelings about this book. On the one hand, I appreciated the uniqueness of this book's structure, where the entire story essentially followed the main character Alice as she went through various "activities of daily living" that included becoming a caretaker for her stepfather as well as working on a project about reclusive artist Tehching Hsieh. Each chapter consisted of seemingly random snippets into Alice's life, interspersed with various tidbits about the Artist (as that is what he is referred to throughout the story), though the details ended up melding together to the point that it becomes difficult to tell whose life — Alice's or the Artist's — was being described.

Having said all that, the unique structure was also what made this a difficult read for me — the narrative seemed to lean toward the philosophical and abstract, with the story also going off on so many different tangents that it made the main arc hard to follow. To be honest, even after finishing this, I found it hard to describe what the story was about. There was tons of "name-dropping" — references to famous people from the literary, art, and philosophy worlds as well as historical places and events, which in itself wasn't a problem, but then the author, Lisa Hsaio Chen, would follow those references with details that would go on for pages, only circling back to the current situation at hand near the end of the chapter. While Chen never makes any connection outright between all the random people / places / events that get brought up throughout the story and the things going on in Alice's life, my guess is that, in structuring the story this way, perhaps Chen was expecting us to see the parallels and make the connection ourselves. Nothing wrong with that technically, but it just made for an exhausting read that I had neither the time or patience for at the moment.

The other thing that made this a frustrating reading experience for me was the inconsistency of the writing, which made parts of the story hard to follow. In addition to more grammatical and sentence structure issues than I would've preferred (I mean, I understand that this is an ARC, but still), there were also times when the author would insert new characters into the story without introducing them or wait until several pages in to introduce them— this was frustrating in the sense that it was both distracting and it broke the flow of the story, as I had to flip back to previous sections of the book to see if I perhaps missed a reference somewhere.

Going into this book, I really wanted to like it and while I found the premise interesting, plus the concept of the story had a lot of potential, the execution unfortunately didn't really work for me. There wasn't much of a plot to speak of, which is usually fine as long as the characters are well-drawn, but in this case, I couldn't seem to connect to any of the characters either.

With all that said though, there were some elements that were done well and held my interest (hence I didn't rate this as low as I probably would have normally), it's just that I wasn't expecting for it to be so tedious and require so much patience. Of course, it could just be me — since this one doesn't publish until April, I would suggest waiting for a few more reviews to come out first to get a a more well-rounded opinion before deciding whether to pick this one up.

Received ARC from W.W. Norton Company via BookBrowse First Impressions program