Delia Cai is a Vanity Fair writer, but this is not the droll, wise-cracking first novel one might expect. It is very different from Monica Heisey’s Really Good, Actually, or half a dozen other novels about women who hilariously haven’t quite got their lives together – and therein lies its charm. Instead, this is a fairly straightforward story about 27-year-old Audrey Zhou, whose parents got married in Wuhan before they moved to the United States, and ultimately Hickory Grove in Peoria, Illinois, to raise her. Audrey is now engaged to a seemingly perfect white photographer called Ben whose parents are wealthy enough to offer to buy the couple a home.
Audrey and Ben are returning to her family home for the Christmas holidays, but Audrey has effectively reinvented herself while living in New York and much of the book’s tension comes from her trying to reconcile the slightly stiff teenager she was with the happy, successful professional she has become. If this sounds prosaic, in many ways it is, but there is a fluency to Cai’s prose that makes this ordinary story worth reading.
Audrey’s mother is terse and judgmental to the point of comedy, even calling her daughter’s perfectly nice high-school crush, Kyle, a man of “low quality”. This characterisation never becomes overblown but there is a viscerally claustrophobic quality to the mother-daughter relationship, not least when Audrey mentions that her mother used to call her “xin gan”, the Mandarin word for darling but which literally translated means my “heart and liver”.
Like the heroine of Celine Song’s recent film Past Lives, Audrey must choose between the object of her adolescent infatuation and the man she has made a life with as an adult. In the film, the contrast is between the heroine’s childhood friend in South Korea and her husband in New York. Audrey needs to make a choice between Kyle, the classmate she was infatuated with as a teenager in Peoria, and her fiance in New York. She describes her move away from her home town as a “migration”; poignantly, even her mother can ultimately see it is wrong of her to criticise her child for moving away, as she did precisely the same thing.
The characterisation of Ben, the perfect boyfriend, is less successful – Cai never really unpacks his apparently unflappable amiability so that he becomes a fully rounded character. It’s not clear if we are supposed to believe in all his astounding qualities, or if Cai is hinting rather too subtly that he’s a sham. Audrey describes his appeal in these terms: “And that was what I had fallen in love with, this ability to smooth away the edges and take care of everything for me.”
Central Places may not set the world alight, but there is strength in Cai’s choice of a heroine who is resolutely not flailing around amusingly, whatever problems she may have. This is also a novel that made me realise how rare and refreshing it is to read an account in mainstream fiction of what it’s like to grow up with Chinese parents in small-town America, where the greatest compliment you can be paid is that you don’t “even look that Asian”.
• Central Places by Delia Cai is published by Merky (£9.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
