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A Novel
by Weike Wang
Book Reviewed by:From the award-winning author of Chemistry, a sharp-witted, insightful novel about a marriage as seen through the lens of two family vacations.
Keru and Nate are college sweethearts who marry despite their family differences: Keru's strict, Chinese, immigrant parents demand perfection ("To use a dishwasher is to admit defeat," says her father), while Nate's rural, white, working-class family distrusts his intellectual ambitions and his "foreign" wife.
Some years into their marriage, the couple invites their families on vacation. At a Cape Cod beach house, and later at a luxury Catskills bungalow, Keru, Nate, and their giant sheepdog navigate visits from in-laws and unexpected guests, all while wondering if they have what it takes to answer the big questions: How do you cope when your spouse and your family of origin clash? How many people (and dogs) make a family? And when the pack starts to disintegrate, what can you do to shepherd everyone back together?
With her "wry, wise, and simply spectacular" style (People) and "hilarious deadpan that recalls Gish Jen and Nora Ephron" (O, The Oprah Magazine), Weike Wang offers a portrait of family that is equally witty, incisive, and tender.
Rental House follows a married couple on two fraught vacations. Nate, who is white, and Keru, who is Chinese American, met as Yale students and live in Manhattan. Now in their mid-thirties, they decide to rent a cottage in Cape Cod for a month in the summer and host their families in turn. Although some might find their situation (childfree, with a "fur baby") stereotypical, it does reflect that of a growing number of aging millennials. Wang portrays them sympathetically, but there is also a note of gentle satire. The way that identity politics comes into the novel is not exactly subtle, but it does feel true to life. And it is very clever how Wang examines the matters of race, class, ambition, and parenthood through the lens of vacations. Like a two-act play, the framework is simple and concise, yet so revealing about contemporary American society...continued
Full Review
(787 words)
(Reviewed by Rebecca Foster).
Weike Wang's Rental House takes place during a couple's two vacations — one to Cape Cod and the other to the Catskills. Here are a few other novels in which vacations are equally illuminating about the characters' personalities and relationship dynamics.
Cape Cod:
Sandwich (2024) by Catherine Newman: Cape Cod is thick with memories for Rocky and her family, who have been vacationing there every summer for 20 years. Though grateful for the chance to spend time with her young adult children, she's also nostalgic for the trips made in their childhood. As part of the "sandwich generation," Rocky is torn between her concern for her aging parents and for her children. Pregnancy loss still haunts her, too. She tries to hide her ...
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Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some to be chewed on and digested.
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Elif Batuman, author of The Idiot
Funny and delightful, Rental House is a story for anyone who's experienced demanding parents, misunderstanding in-laws, a vacation-gone-wrong, or mid-life questions about how to reconcile your own personality liabilities with those of the person you love most.
