How Much of These Hills Is Gold
C Pam Zhang · 2020
Two Chinese-American children in the Gold Rush West, carrying their dead father across a mythologized American terrain. Zhang reinvents the Western and writes about belonging, grief, and erasure in prose that reads like a new mythology being made in real time.
The case against
Zhang's mythmaking takes liberties that keep jolting you out of the history: tigers in the American West, buffalo wherever the lyric requires them. Midway, the dead father seizes the narration for a long second-person monologue, and the novel's momentum never fully recovers. Lucy and Sam read more as positions (assimilation, refusal) than as children.
Best of Last 10 Years · the Pro canon
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
if this one calls to you, so will these →
