Rental House

by Weike Wang

I remember actively panicking when, as a kid confined to the backseat of my parent’s rental car, my large-at-the-time adult fantasy novel dwindled during a particularly long summer trip. We were somewhere in (east?) Texas, and all I wanted was a Waldenbooks. And while my most embedded memory from that trip was my own ceaseless discharge of tears after being served a fish—a full, looks-like-a-fish-but-cooked fish, with eyes and a head and fins—there were tears of relief when one random hotel had a full shopping mall attached. After driving for miles without anything but Texas dust and my parents, finding a shopping mall (and in the early 90s, malls had bookstores!) was like having access to dormroom broadband internet again after being home with dial-up over Thanksgiving break—which I recognize is technically a more contemporary reference, but feels more archaic than malls with bookstores.

The particular bookstore in this Houston or Dallas Galleria also had book four of The Malloreon, which in my head I had already bargained away; if the store only sold book five, I would just keep going on in the series and catch up later. I’m pretty sure I was prepared to repurchase book one or two, but it need not come to that—having found the book I wanted, I was free to finish the final pages of The Demon Lord of Karanda by sneaking out of bed and into the bathroom, where I sat in an empty bathtub with the overhead light on so as not to disturb my parents’ sleep. What I might do to entertain myself in the car as I hurtled through the finite pages of my imaginary world was a problem for the next day. Here begins the foundation story for my anxieties, or, at least, the particular ones where I always over-pack long books for short trips, at least.

Cut to thirty years later: I plan to bring Rental House on my weeklong family vacation. I’ve slowly unraveled the three-novel minimum that makes packing for trips absurd—not only am I, as an adult, able to just sit somewhere without a book, but I now know that traveling anywhere with small children means that I won’t actually read anything, at any time. Rental House is a slender volume, easy to toss in suitcase or backpack, easy to pack as aspirational vacation reading, easy to glance at for a few minutes before the kids awaken: also, apparently, easy to finish in a weekend. To be specific, the weekend before you leave on a family trip. 

i read, you drive

The book was sharp enough to cut through some of the conversational clichés that haunt the opening pages. When it started, I was worried, as it occasionally stumbles over the same broadsides as other media in the same genre of child-free urbanite couples that “kn[e]w the names of every dog on the hill but not the owners.” Those Donny Darko-style pop-cultural digressions into, say, the movie Idiocracy–whose premise is that smart people eventually stop having kids and society descends into ignorance–feel more like a feint disguised to show you the kind of book this could have been if it were a tedious also-ran. Instead, Rental House softly veers off into less, “Here’s an unrelated concept about the real world that my characters will transparently discuss,” to more, “These are biting details about the specific little weirdos within the textual framework of this book, which is based on reality but isn’t simply a dumping ground for extended referential riffing.” The broad combination of baseline character traits could be presented as parody: childless couple; from different cultural backgrounds; Ivy Leaguers; NYC. If this is your first book with all of these concepts, then the first few dozen pages might be memorable. For anyone else who has read contemporary fiction, it’s formulaic–even tedious–in structure, until a thing happens to jolt the Hallmark/Lifetime characterizations off their weathered track. Things don’t need to be completely fresh to be interesting—sometimes, taking the well-worn path in the beginning makes getting lost in the woods all the more harrowing.

It’s not an view from very far away: Rental House has you right up in Nate and Keru’s business, in very particular points in time, with an omniscient narrator that puts me in an Edith Wharton frame of mind:

At the time of the inflamed skin comment, Keru had been a daughter-in-law for three years. The in-law gave her a comfortable sense of distance, but she would have preferred the word daughter be left out, as in the Chinese system, where she would simply be called wife of son.

A few paragraphs later, Keru says something a bit awkward:

The table when silent as it usually did when wife of son said something out of sync and hard to interpret.

Small callbacks like that make me smile, like I’m in cahoots with the narrator, like we’re buddies sort of gossiping about what is going on with Keru, with Nate, how are they doing really, I sure hope things are ok with them, really.

The book is cut into two parts—Nate and Keru basically dealing with the world, and then Nate and Keru dealing with each other. In the second act, a personal favorite thread takes a few unremarkable scenes and compounds them into something quite potent; while going about their official plot-actions, one half of the couple unconsciously moves six throw pillows, only for the other to, equally unconsciously, repeatedly replace them in a dance so stultifying that neither party ever bothers to remark upon it:

She went to the other side of the living room to tidy up the throw pillows that he’d thrown off the couch earlier to make more room for his legs

.…

During this time, Nate went to the couch and removed the six pillows. He sat down, put up his legs, and closed his eyes.

…

He put his wet clothes in the dryer, put on dry clothes from their dresser, and reappeared in the living room, where Keru had set the six pillows back on the couch and moved the lounge chair right up against the window to get a better view.

…

Keru had returned the six pillows to the couch and was buoyed among them, uncomfortably.

There is no resolution of this scene, no moment when Keru looks at the pillows and thinks, “Is this what it has come to?” or where Nate, summed up so well by his posture toward his student loans–“When Nate learned what his wife had done, he was grateful but also perturbed by a gesture that he deemed wholly unnecessary, since either he would have paid if off or hakuna matata,”—reacts strongly to the pillows being routinely replaced. These are not Chekhov’s Pillows. It just sort of happens, mentioned to we readers amidst all the other details of Nate and Keru that make them feel both unique and uniquely sad. All respect to Anna Karenina’s opening line, but Rental House makes a strong case that despite how incredibly unique each small detail of relationship might be, the combination of unfortunate actions and events fit together into the same vaguely unhappy shape for a whole lot of people. Maybe that well-worn path in the opening is cliché-bait so much as acknowledgement that reality is pretty dull, and sad.

I really enjoyed reading Rental House. I wouldn’t recommend it as vacation reading, though–you’ll quickly find yourself scrambling to replace it, and I cannot remember the last time fate brought me to a hotel with a bookstore-laden mall attached to it.