Asian American Literature Fans

A Review of Jade Sharma’s Problems (Coffee House Press, 2016)
By Stephen Hong Sohn

I’ve been trying to catch up with as many Coffee House press books as possible, so this one came to the top of the list! I actually read about half of this book about three months ago, and then got caught up on so much work, I couldn’t come back to it until this summer. To put it bluntly, the read was pretty harrowing, so I didn’t mind a break. Before we move on to the text, I want to note that Jade Sharma passed away in July of 2019 at 39 years old. This page at Catapult where her friends and colleagues share their thoughts on her.

Let’s let the Coffee House Press official page give us some more context: “Dark, raw, and very funny, Problems introduces us to Maya, a young woman with a smart mouth, time to kill, and a heroin hobby that isn’t much fun anymore. Maya’s been able to get by in New York on her wits and a dead-end bookstore job for years, but when her husband leaves her and her favorite professor ends their affair, her barely-calibrated life descends into chaos, and she has to make some choices. Maya’s struggle to be alone, to be a woman, and to be thoughtful and imperfect and alive in a world that doesn’t really care what happens to her is rendered with dead-eyed clarity and unnerving charm. This book takes every tired trope about addiction and recovery, ‘likeable’ characters, and redemption narratives, and blows them to pieces.”

I loved the last line of this description: the term “likeable” is not what I’d call most of these characters. Caught in the depths of addiction, many of these characters simply revolve around the thing that they desperately crave: their next high. For Maya, the first half of the novel is really about her trying to find some balance between her addiction and living her life, but when her marriage to Peter ultimately falters, that seems to be the catalyst for her spiraling out of control. The “problems” of this novel are myriad, but one of the clearest ones is that there’s never a sense of where rock bottom actually is. At some point, she does end up in a rehabilitation center. You get the sense that finally, just finally, she may have kicked her addiction, but the novel’s conclusion sees her fall back into its grips.

Then, in the final pages—and your requisite spoiler warning is here—there seems to be yet another 180. You can’t help but be skeptical: given all of the ways that Maya has seemed unable to wrest herself free from addiction, has it really happened? Whatever the answer to this question, Sharma’s blunt, take-no-prisoners writing style is superbly positioned for this kind of character. There’s lots of other intriguing elements to this novel. For instance, Sharma takes the time to develop the very complicated boundaries of married life. Second, Maya engages in an extramarital affair with one of her professors—she, at one point, is interested in writing a novel. Though this relationship (not surprisingly) ends, she does develop an intriguing, though certainly flawed, friendship with this professor, who somehow manages to stay in touch with her despite her turbulent lifestyle. Sharma’s Problems is something certainly one could add to an Asian American literature course, especially ones that might be considering a topic like “bad” Asian Americans. Perhaps, the most productive intervention the novel does make is to undermine the predominant model minority narrative. A provocative, relentless novel.

Buy the Book Here.

Review Author: Stephen Hong Sohn
Review Editor: Gnei Soraya Zarook

If you have any questions or want us to consider your book for review, please don’t hesitate to contact us via email!
Prof. Stephen Hong Sohn at ssohnucr@gmail.com
Gnei Soraya Zarook, PhD Student in English, at gzaro001@ucr.edu