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A Novel
by Souvankham Thammavongsa
Book Reviewed by:From Giller Prize and O. Henry Award winner Souvankham Thammavongsa comes a revelatory novel about loneliness, love, labor, and class, an intimate and sharply written book following a nail salon owner as she toils away for the privileged clients who don't even know her true name.
"I live in a world of Susans. I got name tags for everyone who works at this nail salon, and on every one is printed the name 'Susan.'"
Ning is a retired boxer, but to the customers who visit her nail salon, she is just another worker named Susan. On this summer's day, much like any other, the Susans buff and clip and polish and tweeze. They listen and smile and nod. But beneath this superficial veneer, Ning is a woman of rigorous intellect and profound complexity. A woman enthralled by the intricacy and rhythms of her work, but also haunted by memories of paths not taken and opportunities lost. A woman navigating the complex power dynamics among her fellow Susans, whose greatest fears and desires lie just behind the gossip they exchange.
As the day's work grinds on, the friction between Ning's two identities—as anonymous manicurist and brilliant observer of her own circumstances—will gather electric and crackling force, and at last demand a reckoning with the way the world of privilege looks at a woman like Ning.
Told over a single day with razor-sharp precision and wit, Pick a Color confirms Souvankham Thammavongsa's place as literature's premier chronicler of the immigrant experience, in its myriad, complex, and slyly subversive forms.
3
I let her in.
The new girl didn't knock, or do anything to call attention to herself. Probably thinks knocking on glass is being too loud. Probably thinks when she breathes she's making too much noise. She's just standing there now, smiling at me, waving her right hand. The way she waves her hand tells me everything about her. Quick, eager to please. She's dressed as I told her to dress. Black pants, black shirt, black running shoes. Her hair is black and shoulder-length.
I motion for her to follow me. We take a few steps past the front desk and walk down a short hallway, to the back. I point, tell her to put her phone and bag in the back room. "No one goes in there but us," I say. She goes in there alone.
When she comes back, I start right away. I don't like to chitchat, no how-are-yous, no coddling. No tell-me-about-yourself-now. Just get to it.
I wave the new girl over to our wall of nail polish, close to our one big window. I ask her, testing, "Are they all full?" Pointing to the four...
What’s the last book you purchased? Why did you select it? Paperback, hardback or ebook?
I last book I purchased was Pick A Color in hard cover after hearing an interview with the author Souvankham Thammavongsa on CBC's Bookends podcast. Its next to be read :crossed_fingers: unless holds come up at the library.
-Michele_P
These women are not passive victims of the service economy. They know how to upsell, how to poach customers from the rival salon, how to get exactly what they want. They talk shit in "their" language, so as to not be understood by the English-speaking clientele. There is a baseball player customer they call "Two Pumps," in reference to what they assume about his sexual prowess. The endless vehicular riffing they do about a woman who goes by Van will be familiar to anyone who has ever been desperate to kill time on an eight-hour service industry shift. It would be easy to assume that the reader is meant to pity Ning, if not for her position as a service worker, then because she seemingly has no love in her life. A simplistic reading of the novel would suggest Ning is in denial about her needs, that she has accepted a life with no close ties because she fears intimacy. But Thammavongsa steers quite wide of that interpretation...continued
Full Review
(816 words)
(Reviewed by Lisa Butts).
Eleanor Catton, author of Birnam Wood
Only as masterful an ironist as Souvankham Thammavongsa could have pulled this off: a work of urgent and impassioned solidarity that is also a defiant, even pugnacious, assertion of narrative autonomy and technical control. Pick a Color is a knockout: every punch lands.
Souvankham Thammavongsa's novel Pick a Color takes place over the span of one day at a nail salon, Susan's, owned by the main character Ning. This slice-of-life style of storytelling has been employed by numerous authors for different purposes—to heighten dramatic tension, to explore one character's daily reality, or to defy traditional narrative expectations. The latter two are certainly features of Pick a Color. The lack of overt conflict or suspense sets it apart from the three-act plot arc we typically see in novels.
If there is an origin point in modern literature for this single-day storytelling, it could be James Joyce's Ulysses, which follows Leopold Bloom through one day in Dublin in June 1904. Ulysses, in turn, ...
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