BookBrowse Reviews Rental House by Weike Wang

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In Weike Wang's third novel, a thirtysomething couple's interactions on vacation reveal much about race, class, and ambition.

For many of us, vacations offer an escape from the everyday — a chance to explore new places, have fresh experiences, and see sites of cultural and natural beauty. But as Alain de Botton explains in The Art of Travel, it's not uncommon for a vacation to fail to live up to our expectations of total relaxation and perfect harmony with partners and families. Why? Plans may go awry, but a more fundamental reason than poor weather or rotten luck is that we take ourselves with us: all our hang-ups, prejudices, bad habits, and unfortunate character traits. In fact, they seem to be on starker display in an unfamiliar setting.

Weike Wang's first two novels revolve around young Chinese American women in STEM. Her third, 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. First Keru's traditional immigrant parents travel in from Minnesota; then Nate's right-wing parents come up from North Carolina.

The story mostly unfolds through conversations and flashbacks. Over shared meals and trips to beaches and lighthouses, Wang develops each character's unique outlook. Mild clashes over politics and values arise due to generational and racial differences and misunderstandings. "There was no avoiding the Mao card. Like there was no avoiding the Trump card," Wang writes. Keru's parents expect her to be a conventional wife — cooking and cleaning — and a mother. Nate's parents, too, await grandchildren. They are ignorant of the microaggressions that Keru regularly experiences that make her wonder where she truly belongs.

Keru's choices can be a little hard to relate to. For instance, when a woman on the beach challenges Keru and Nate for letting their sheepdog, Mantou, run free despite the signs clearly stating that dogs must be on a leash at all times, Keru throws a rock at her. Without giving much away, I can say that the book's cover image also hints at a disastrous finale to the Cape Cod trip, for which Keru is responsible. In rebelling against external rules, she seems to be venting her anger at the internal restrictions she has absorbed from those around her. Wang thus effectively uses Keru's aberrant behavior as evidence of her frustration.

Five years later, it's time for another vacation. Keru, now a partner in her consulting firm, earns much more than Nate does as an assistant professor researching fruit flies. He is pleased with her choice of a "bungalow" in the Catskills until he discovers it is actually a mini-mansion in a high-end gated community — "Nate worried what staying in a place like this said about the people they'd become." His discomfort over the conspicuous consumption mounts when they meet the neighbors, a Romanian American couple with a little boy. Mircea and Elena offend Keru by referring to her as a "DINK" (double income, no kids). Although friendly and cosmopolitan, they are snobbish about American culture and insensitive about race.

Toward the end of this trip, Nate's brother Ethan and his girlfriend show up unannounced. Ethan fills Nate in on their old high school classmates: sordid stories of dropouts, drug abuse, unemployment, and mental illness. For Keru, this magnifies the difference between their families' social class. "Fine, Nate's family had come from white trash, but why did the trash have to be dragged out, discussed, and enumerated?" she thinks. Her lack of sympathy, like her peculiar choices, makes Keru a prickly character. However, her attitude could at least partly be understood as a reaction to how her in-laws "other" her for having a Chinese background. The stories of unfortunate lives in the brothers' hometown are a prelude to Ethan asking for seed funds so he can start a gym there. In the discussion that follows, money emerges as a touchy issue for the wider family.

All of these interactions put Keru and Nate's choices as a couple into perspective as they near age 40. 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 (see Beyond the Book). Like a two-act play, the framework is simple and concise, yet so revealing about contemporary American society.

This review first ran in the November 20, 2024 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.