This month, we’re hunkering down with novels about homes and the family dramas that unfold within them, from a luxury bungalow in the Catskills to a historic mansion in Kolkata.
Rental House: A Novel
Weike Wang (Riverhead Books, 224 pp., $28, December 2024)
Weike Wang’s third book, Rental House, is a novel of contrasts. The married couple at its heart comes from two different worlds: Nate grew up in a poor white family in Appalachia, while Keru and her parents fled Mao’s China when she was young before settling into a middle-class life in Minnesota. The former’s family are Trump supporters; the latter apolitical. And although both Nate and Keru are now white-collar professionals in New York City, Nate is a bumbling and idealistic biologist, while Keru is rigid, driven, and determined to make money in consulting. (“Keru had no interest in mellowing out. Mellowing out seemed like a kind of death.”)
The chasms between the two families, and between Nate and Keru themselves, deepen as personalities, cultures, and belief systems collide in Wang’s meticulously structured book. The novel takes place in two parts: First, at a vacation house on Cape Cod, where the couple hosts each set of in-laws back-to-back; then, five years later, at a luxury bungalow in the Catskills, where a quiet getaway is thwarted by unexpected neighbors and guests. Across these trips, the one constant is the couple’s massive sheepdog—named Mantou, despite Nate’s hesitation given “the propensity of yuppie couples to name their expensive dogs after basic starch items.”
Wang’s prose is acerbic and taut, marked by a distinct deadpan humor (Keru’s father tells Nate that “to use a dishwasher is to admit defeat”). At times, her characterizations can veer into the stereotypical: A Romanian man staying next door in the Catskills tells Nate that he was surprised to learn that no one he knows in the United States owns a gun, adding, “I guess you have to leave Park Slope to find those people”; his wife later tells Nate and Keru to move to Europe, where “there are no issues with race.”
Yet Wang also evokes the very real subtleties of racism in the United States and the quiet devastation of never quite belonging in one place. When the Romanian wife says that one benefit of marrying “within your group” is that the children “come out more cohesive,” Keru’s response, after the initial indignation, is heartbreaking. “I wish I were more cohesive,” she tells her husband later in private. Rental House is a meditation on privilege, race, class, immigration, and assimilation. But, perhaps most of all, it is an exploration of the meaning of family, especially in our globalized world—who counts as family, what we owe those people, and why they might be worth the trouble even when dysfunction is unavoidable.—Chloe Hadavas
The Magnificent Ruins
Nayantara Roy (Algonquin Books, 448 pp., $29, November 2024)
Although Nayantara Roy’s debut novel, The Magnificent Ruins, begins in New York City, most of the story takes place in Kolkata, India. In the summer of 2015, Lila De, a 29-year-old Indian American editor at a major publishing house, is whisked back to the city of her birth when her grandfather dies. He has—unexpectedly—bequeathed his home and estate to Lila, to the chagrin of her extended family, most of whom reside together in the historic mansion she inherited.
What follows is an engrossing plot that has it all: There is family drama surrounding Lila’s inheritance, yes. But there is also a love triangle between Lila’s no-labels Brooklyn hookup and her teenage ex-boyfriend in Kolkata. There are deep psychological rifts between Lila and her mother, whose “maternal gene was broken.” There are political undertones, examining West Bengal as a holdout against the Hindu nationalism spreading throughout the country. And there is an element of crime fiction, too, as a colorful cast of lawyers and detectives are embedded within the story.
These are a lot of narrative threads to tie together; there is a reason the book is 448 pages long. But Roy, who is originally from India and now works as a television executive in Los Angeles, does so masterfully. That’s in part because the various plotlines all connect to highlight one central tension: Lila’s insecurity in her expatriate identity.
Lila feels a gulf between herself and her family in Kolkata, both because she has inherited their home and because she is now American. As her aunt tells her in a moment of distress, “You walk around here thinking you’re better than the rest of us, looking at how weak and stupid we must seem, and you think, ‘That’s fine. I’ll just use my dollars to pay for the silly little flowers they can’t afford.’”
One of Roy’s most interesting narrative choices was to set her book in 2015 rather than today. She seems to have selected the last recent moment of unadulterated American political naiveté to further juxtapose Lila’s American optimism against the growing turmoil in India.
In one instance, Lila is surprised to learn that her cousin, a gay leftist journalist, faces threats from violent “goons” affiliated with a “right-wing Hindu party”—a not-so-veiled reference to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party. Lila’s ex later tells her, “I could see it on your face … The relief of an American in these Obama years, the assurance of democracy no matter what.”
Early in the book, there is a very brief mention of “candidates who were trying to unseat the Democrats in the next election.” One wonders how Lila’s outlook on her Indian and American halves might have changed had Roy revealed who won that race.—Allison Meakem
December Releases, in Brief
A meddlesome widow faces off against an 8-year-old boy at a grand hotel along the Nile River in Christopher Bollen’s latest thriller, Havoc. Amanda Lee Koe’s Sister Snake transplants a classic Chinese folktale to modern-day New York and Singapore. With Only Stars Know the Meaning of Space, Rwandan-born Namibian writer Rémy Ngamije offers a “literary mixtape” of Namibia’s capital of Windhoek. British author Julia Armfield reimagines King Lear against the backdrop of climate breakdown in Private Rites.
From spare historical details, National Book Award-winning author Lily Tuck weaves a haunting fictional narrative about a real-life Catholic girl from Poland who died in Auschwitz in The Rest Is Memory. Gu Byeong-mo’s bestseller Apartment Women, centered on the lives of four women in a government-run experimental community outside of Seoul, is translated into English by Chi-Young Kim. The only surviving member of a Colorado Buddhist retreat takes a postapocalyptic road trip out West in Cary Groner’s The Way. And renowned Guatemalan writer Augusto Monterroso’s only novel, The Rest Is Silence, originally published in 1978, is translated into English by Aaron Kerner.—CH
Books are independently selected by FP editors. FP earns an affiliate commission on anything purchased through links to Amazon.com on this page.