A Review of Weike Wang’s Rental House (Riverhead, 2024)

[lsobiesk]

Written by Stephen Hong Sohn
Edited by Lizzy Sobiesk

Weike Wang has already graced us with her third novel Rental House (Riverhead, 2024)! As always, her economically precise prose grounds yet another intriguing and complicated character story. Let’s let the official marketing description do some work for us to get the ball rolling: “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?”

 

The structure of this novel is what interests me the most. It reminds me a bit of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse in that there is a section that occurs in the middle in which time passes. The interlude section allows readers to get a glimpse into the way that the relationship between Keru and Nate has changed over time as well as how their general families have evolved as they have aged. In the first section, we see the two in the earlier stages of their relationship, where they are on more equal footing, especially with respect to their careers. Their in-laws meet them in quick succession, with Keru’s parents coming first. Notably, their in-laws do not overlap, which is not surprising. The challenge of integrating one figure of the couple with their in-laws is precisely what drives the first half of the spare novel forward. They all do their best, but there’s naturally some complications and tension. Keru also has this very weird habit of throwing things at strange moments, and the first section ends rather abruptly in the wake of another throwing episode. The second section sees the pair now moving into middle age. Keru has advanced into a very lucrative professional career as a business consultant, while Nate, though also successful as an academic in the sciences, nevertheless does not command such a big salary. The shift in their economic locations is certainly at play in this section, with Keru preferring the creature comforts of more luxurious accommodations, while Nate prefers something more simple. Whereas the first section involved successive visits with in-laws, the second involves visits with other couples. The tensions and complications that grounded the first section reappear here in different ways. For instance, Keru and Nate end up spending some time with strangers (a man, his wife, and their toddler child) in neighboring bungalows. The man, Mircea, and his wife, Elena, are of Romanian background but actually live in the Netherlands; they have come to the United States on a contracted job, bringing along Lucian, their young child.  Their conversations sometimes turn to the nature of American identity, with Keru not always agreeing with their assessments and at one point leading to a kind of mild rupture between them. Wang also includes a strange section toward the conclusion which seems to suggest that there could be multiple endings to this particular story. It reminded me a little bit of Sigrid Nunez’s The Friend in that regard. I’ll offer a gentle spoiler warning here, so turn away unless you want to know about the second ending. The first ending is pretty underwhelming, but the second involves Nate’s estranged brother Ethan arriving alongside his girlfriend Morgan. Ethan arrives clearly with an intent in mind, but it’s not sure what that is until they have all spent a good amount of time together. Ethan has always been a challenge for Nate, as Ethan has bounced around from job to job and has generally always relied upon the financial assistance of their mother. Ethan ultimately reveals that he is hoping that Nate and Keru will invest in his idea for a gym; Nate does not want to support him, but Keru thinks some sort of limited help might be okay. Whatever the case, Ethan and Nate end up fighting, with Keru having to mediate a kind of détente between the two. The novel strangely ends here, but I suppose it maintains the abruptness of the first section. Wang’s keen ability to dive into the emotional stickiness of our human relationships is what makes this book such a great read. Even without a dynamic plot, you’re propelled by the ways in which you see these characters develop and how they interact with others. In this sense, Wang has not strayed away from her tried and true prose formula. After all, Joan is Okay and Chemistry are ultimately narratives grounded in character over plot, with Wang’s prose always providing that crystalline anchor. You can easily knock this one out in one sitting, which, if you end up starting the book, I bet you will.

 

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