A Quitter’s Paradise

Chang debuts with the understated and quietly devastating story of a grieving 20-something woman. In 2013 New York City, Eleanor Liu is on track to fulfill her late mother Rita’s low expectations, having dropped out of a neuroscience graduate program to work in her classmate-turned-husband’s lab. But, bored and unfulfilled both matrimonially and professionally, Eleanor soon has an affair with a colleague. In the months following her mother’s death, Eleanor makes increasingly risky and bizarre choices, such as spending unsanctioned time with a primate from the lab, before decamping for her childhood home in New Jersey, where she goes through Rita’s belongings and begins to grasp a greater sense of her life. Eleanor’s narration alternates with flashbacks to her childhood and adolescence—notably her relationship with her troubled older sister—and of her parents’ emigration from Taipei in the late 1970s. The somewhat pensive tone is broken up by moments of levity, but always returns to questions of family history and the impossibility of understanding someone else’s story when one’s own memories are so unreliable. Chang is off to a promising start. (June)