Portrait of a quiet marriage, or of America’s simmering tensions?

On the surface, Weike Wang’s rueful and tender third novel, “Rental House,” is a portrait of a seemingly low-key marriage in which both husband and wife regularly downgrade expectations so as to avert conflict and disappointment. On closer inspection, though, Wang’s slender tour de force offers one of the most nuanced, astute critiques of America now I’ve read in years. And it’s also frequently hilarious.
Keru and Nate meet cute — or whatever a skeptic’s version of that is — at a Halloween party while attending Yale. Their costumes express their disdain for the holiday: She wears a leopard-print turtleneck, a plaid jacket and shiny gold pants; he’s strapped a white foam shark fin to his back. “What are you supposed to be?” Nate asks Keru. “Indecision,” she answers. “Why? What are you supposed to be?” she asks Nate. “Can’t tell? A great white,” he says.
Keru’s parents had emigrated from China to Minnesota and raised her to be ambitious, self-exacting and altogether formidable. Later on the night of their first encounter, Keru admits to Nate that “some people say they’re scared of me.” Then, without missing a beat, she shouts, “Boo,” which causes Nate to jump. And her ability to startle Nate out of complacency remains a primary element of their future marital dynamic: “He was scared but also intrigued. He imagined the first scientists felt the same when they stumbled across electricity.”
When the novel opens, Keru and Nate have been married for five years and are just arriving at a cottage they’ve rented on Cape Cod, where both sets of parents will join them for a week each. She’s on track to make partner at her firm; he’s become a science professor specializing in the study of fruit flies. When they initially met, Keru had assumed that Nate was yet another rich Yalie, when in fact he’s from a small town in the Blue Ridge Mountains where his working-class family frequently debate whether they classify as “white trash.” He was at Yale on a full scholarship and has always been uninterested in money, which perplexes Keru, who is all about financial security.
At the rental house, the couple and their dog, Mantou, brace for the arrival of Keru’s parents, scrubbing floors and relaundering bed linens — a futile exercise as no amount of cleaning will satisfy Keru’s vocally judgmental parents, who show up armed with “an array of meat and spinach buns, scallion pancakes, waffles, and an assortment of fluids.” Though it’s a full two years into the pandemic, “few people remained as vigilant as Keru’s parents,” who refuse to leave the house in the course of their stay, which is largely spent watching real-estate shows on TV and arguing about whether “ease is an illusion.” Her father forbids her from using the dishwasher: “To use a dishwasher is to admit defeat. No one is so busy that they can’t take ten minutes out of their day to clean up their own mess.” Though their daughter lives in Manhattan, they urge her to boycott the city’s dangerous subways, or bring Nate with her at all times. To this Keru responds: “Like in my pocket?”
Wang is an exquisite practitioner of deadpan, and her dialogue is full of laugh-aloud zingers. But she also uses humorous insights to pierce the outer shell and plunge into themes of loneliness and despair. Wang’s also adept at expanding way beyond her characters’ micro universe, to comment on how Asian Americans are “othered,” forced to navigate the world differently, or on the class disparity among the Chinese diaspora, which relegates Keru’s farming family from Southwest China as belonging to those whose dialect is sneeringly called “talk of the dirt.” So often in the course of reading “Rental House,” I found myself snorting with hilarity at Wang’s perfect comic timing, only to realize that she was getting to something much deeper.
After Keru’s parents depart, Nate’s drive up from North Carolina, where his mother worked as a waitress until she had kids, and his father managed a small grocery store. They are proud of their son’s accomplishments but look down on his “elitist” tendencies, worrying that he will forget where he came from. They are outwardly accepting of Keru, but when she’s not around, they pepper Nate with questions he views as xenophobic.
In 2016, a rift developed between Nate and his parents when his mother posted a happy face emoji on a group chat on the occasion of Trump’s election, despite knowing what he represented to Nate and Keru. When Nate asks his mother why she’d sent that emoji, she replies: “I’m sorry you feel that way … but I should be allowed to express myself. This is my country too.” In response, Nate canceled his plans to visit on Thanksgiving and Christmas. The gathering in Cape Cod years later is meant to make amends, and all are on their best behavior until one night, around a campfire, Keru’s simmering resentment boils over into rage, and she hurls a burning log into the house, where Nate and his astonished parents quickly move to douse the fire.
As Keru ponders the complexities and frustrations of American life, she concludes her parents were “tricked” into coming to this country in the first place. Her father’s impeccable work record never led to a promotion, and her mother was never able to find work in their mostly white town. Their few friends were all Chinese immigrants, who socialize in private, where they can speak Chinese without being stared at. Their motto seemed to be: “Stay neutral and stay out of it.” How was this life better, Keru wonders: “An ability to endure hardship had, in America, been translated into a willingness to accept less.” But there was also “Stockholm syndrome at play,” Wang writes: “While Keru’s parents could never assimilate, there was a chance their daughter could. … Inside Keru’s mind lived a large Mobius strip that looped at high speeds.”
Throughout Wang’s three works of fiction, one discerns the same singular wit and interrogation of mores about gender, ethnicity and income disparity. But here she is at her most poignant and penetrating. She’s cast her lens, with immense empathy, on how divisiveness has hardened our desolation and made us more desirous than ever of a connection we rarely feel. She’s done what only great fiction writers can do.
Leigh Haber is a writer, editor and publishing strategist. She was director of Oprah’s Book Club and books editor for O, the Oprah Magazine.