Chemistry
A Chinese-American PhD student in chemistry watches her life stall as she can't complete her dissertation. Wang's short, dry, formally inventive debut won the PEN/Hemingway and captures millennial academic anxiety with dark comedy.
The same short, unchaptered paragraphs that admirers praise read as choppy to others, one reader complaining “my own reading voice was constantly being cut-off” by the format, calling the book “flash pieces knitted together into a whole” rather than a novel. Despite first-person, present-tense narration, several readers say they never feel let all the way in, describing a narrator who leaves “the reader still feels somewhat at a remove”. At barely two hundred pages, it still drags for some, circling the narrator’s indecision, “standing still, afraid to choose a path”, without much sense of forward motion. Readers primed by the PEN/Hemingway win and the Lab Girl comparisons say the book they got was smaller and quieter than the hype promised.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
