Charles Yu's Third Class Superhero

[pylduck.livejournal.com]

Rounding out my Thanksgiving break "fun" reading is Charles Yu's Third Class Superhero (Harvest, 2006).



I'm probably not going to be able to finish it completely by tomorrow, but I've read a few of the short stories so far. I'm not sure if I will bother to finish reading them because they're not really my cup of tea. Writing-wise, Yu's prose reminds me a bit of David Marshall Chan's, but it's definitely a step up. Both writers flirt with (and perhaps are trying to emulate) the kind of fabulist writing of someone like Italo Calvino but don't always pull it off. The second story in the collection, "401(k)," exemplifies this kind of writing that offers abstract characters in a way that allegorizes the story:

When we met, my wife was Pretty Girl in Import Beer Commercial. The night was young, the bar was full but not crowded, the aesthetic was clean, sleek, spare. No words were spoken. The city streets were empty and safe and artfully lit. The demos worked: 24-29 for me; she was 18-24; and we were in the same disposable-income bracket. She left before I could get her number.

There is a clear intention to critique contemporary culture -- in the case of this story, it's an insistent referencing of advertising and financial calculations as the way subjectivity and life narratives get rescripted.

The title story of the collection features Nathan, a "good guy" in a super hero world whose power to extract a couple gallons of water from the air leaves him less than desirable for the super hero teams. As an unexemplary figure in this world of great super heros and awful villains, he falls into an ambiguous category of the middling masses. It is a thoughtful story about moral ambiguity.

The most notable aspect of this short story collection for scholars of Asian American literature, of course, is Yu's clear avoidance of writing Asian American characters or stories. Whether or not this is good or bad -- expanding what kind of writing Asian Americans are "allowed" to produce or effecting a kind of color-blindness that ultimately misses the impact of racialization -- is up for debate. None of the earlier stories make any gestures towards rooting characters in particular ethnic or racial or cultural backgrounds (should we read them as white? as Asian? as black?) though some of the later ones might make oblique references to such particularities.

( Author photo. )