Review time! with ‘King of the Armadillos’

“I said The stars are watching; she said Nope – armadillos”

Wendy Chin-Tanner‘s debut novel, King of the Armadillos, was released in July from Flatiron Books. Let’s have a look at it!

Generally, I write briefly about the books I read in my monthly posts and I read them in alphabetical order by writer, but I wanted to give this a bit more attention for a few reasons. I’m Facebook friends with Wendy and her husband, Tyler, and they’re co-publishers of A Wave Blue World, which has some very good comics in their backlist. I’ve never met Wendy in real life, but I have met Tyler a few times at conventions, and he’s an excellent dude and his wife seems amazingly cool. So, when she got her novel published, I bought it, naturally, and I wanted to give her some publicity, although it seems like far more luminary people than I have praised this novel, so what the heck am I going to say about it?!?!?

Chin-Tanner tells the story of Victor Chin (he’s loosely based on her grandfather, hence the last name), a New York immigrant teenager in the mid-1950s who’s diagnosed with Hansen’s disease and is sent to a hospital in Louisiana to be cured. He has lived in New York for some years, but he was born in China, so this is the second major displacement in his young life, and a good amount of the book is about his adjustment to the languid atmosphere of the South after spending several years in the hustle and bustle of the city. We also get chapters focusing on his family back in New York – his brother, Henry, is a few years older than he and trusts no one; his father, Sam, runs a laundry and has a long-running relationship with Ruth, a Jewish lady to whom, obviously, he’s not married. Plus, Victor’s mother, to whom Sam is technically still married, is back in China, but Victor is in constant communication with her through letters. Most of the novel focuses on Victor, but Chin-Tanner does not neglect the drama in New York.

It’s an odd book, because it’s almost completely plotless. Some people might think this is a bad thing, but I don’t – plots are often contrived, and often characters are forced to act in ways contrary to their nature because the plot dictates it. Basically, this is a two-year slice of Victor’s life – an important one, to be sure, but still just a small part of it. He’s cured of the disease and eventually leaves the hospital, but there’s not a lot of drama in that. You can call it a “coming-of-age” story, but it’s not really (thank goodness), because Victor isn’t fully formed when he leaves, and while he grows in the hospital, he still has a lot to figure out and he’s still a boy when he gets out – the tragedy in the book is that he hasn’t “come of age” yet when he leaves the hospital, although it’s a tragedy only from one point of view. He falls in with three other teenagers – they exist in varying degrees of friendship – and falls for the girl in the group, Judy, who ends up with one of the boys, Donny. Chin-Tanner doesn’t comment on the syzygy of Sam and Ruth and Victor and Judy, who’s also Jewish, but it’s an interesting mirror image, especially as the specter of racism hangs over the entire book. Victor also discovers that he can play the piano and create his own music, and the passages in which he thinks about music and plays it are the most evocative of the entire narrative. Chin-Tanner does a nice job with the cultural problems Victor faces – he’s ostracized because of his disease, he’s looked down upon in New York because he’s Chinese (which gets a bit better in Louisiana, because everyone at the hospital is in the same boat), and he doesn’t have the confidence of Donny – who’s also Chinese – when it comes to girls. Chin-Tanner has the characters talk about these kinds of issues occasionally, but it’s kind of matter-of-fact (which rings a bit truer than if they were more strident about it), and it’s not constant. It’s background noise, and Victor has to deal with it every so often, but it’s not foremost in his mind. He’s too busy trying to figure out what to do with Judy and his music. Chin-Tanner does a nice job with his quasi-romance with Judy, because Victor doesn’t know how to act around her or react to what she does, and it feels like a teenager who has no experience with this kind of thing and trying to muddle through. Chin-Tanner is an interesting writer, because she’s a poet, so sometimes she’ll break into beautiful, lyrical prose, then pull back into more mundane descriptions, and it gives the book a kind of disjointed but realistic feeling. Victor has a creative mind, but he’s raw and unfocused, and even though the prose is in third person, he’s often the POV character, so the more evocative passages are usually when he’s the focus, and it feels like a teen thing, where he’ll have flights of fancy about the Louisiana landscape but then snap quickly back to the reality of the hospital. It’s a bit odd, but it works pretty well.

The less successful parts of the book are the chapters set in New York, not because they’re badly written, but because the characters aren’t quite as sharp as Victor is and Chin-Tanner doesn’t spend enough time with them. On the one hand, it’s actually kind of interesting – Henry and Ruth, especially, have vast lives outside the pages of the book, and it’s kind of neat to see Chin-Tanner not really address all of it, because it makes the book feel bigger. On the other hand, the end of Victor’s time at the hospital and the decision he makes about his future has a slightly lesser impact because we don’t feel like we know his family well enough … or if we do, we wonder about his choices. His decision about what he does when he leaves Louisiana is a complicated one, and with regard to Ruth, especially (as she was more a “mother” to him than she was to Henry), it’s powerful, but it’s also not quite as emotional as it feels it could be. Again, because of the way Chin-Tanner tells the narrative, the lack of a truly emotional ending is a bit of a feature, not a bug, but on the other hand … I don’t know, I guess I wanted to feel it more? I don’t know how she could have done that, and I recognize this is a case of me wanting two, probably contradictory things from the book, but that’s how I feel.

Despite that, I enjoyed the book – it’s well-written, it tells a story that could easily fall into clichés in an interesting way, and it gives us insights into people and cultures we don’t often read about. It’s more powerfully emotional because Chin-Tanner doesn’t delve too deeply into the characters’ inner lives with flowery prose, so when something hits them, it hits pretty hard and has a bigger impact on us. It’s a strong debut, and I look forward to more from Wendy.

Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ½ ☆ ☆