A weird thing happened when I sat down to review Paul Madonna's latest book. You Know Exactly is Madonna's third and final collection of art and musings gathered from the All Over Coffee series he made for the San Francisco Chronicle between 2004 and 2015. And as I flicked through the beautifully rendered, hyper-detailed depictions of quiet corners of San Francisco, a house appeared that was immediately familiar. It took my brain a second to process.
There, staring back at me, were the front gates of a building I moved into in 2005 and didn't leave until 2013. It was a two-bedroom that, at any given time, had five to ten people staying there. The apartment had so many roommates, so many couch surfers and so many impromptu parties, it seemed entirely feasible to me that Madonna might have passed through at some point.
Bachelder’s short but indelible novel spills forth with kitchen-sink wisdom; it was exactly what I’d been missing as a young father, struggling to make sense of my irrevocably changed existence. For all the profundity that one experiences when becoming a parent—the primordial love; the humbling wonder—there’s also a lot of dullness and mundanity. Child-rearing is an immense task consisting of many mind-numbing moments. Among the reasons Abbott Awaits is remarkable is because it collects these moments and pulls them to center stage. It makes the everyday aspects of middle-class parenting objects of study, of tender observation.
It’s that tension that gives “Nuclear Family” its radioactive fuel: between traditional values in both Korea and Hawaii, between all traditional values and the mores of American capitalism. Early on, the author focuses on the generation gap among the Chos. But somewhere in the middle, Han’s writing becomes experimental — particularly in a section written by Grace full of “redactions” that invite the reader to play an existential variation on Mad Libs. If you can freely substitute words, why not people?