Chemistry
Weike Wang · 2017
A Chinese-American PhD student in chemistry watches her life stall as she can't complete her dissertation. Wang's short, dry, formally inventive debut won the PEN/Hemingway and captures millennial academic anxiety with dark comedy.
The case against
Wang's narrator deflects every feeling into a science factoid, and the trick is the whole book; by the midpoint you can predict the chemistry lesson before the paragraph delivers it. Eric, the patient boyfriend, is patient and little else. At two hundred slim pages of one-beat fragments, the stall the novel describes becomes the experience of reading it.
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