The Satisfaction Café

The crisp and assured latest from Wang (Family Trust) follows a Taiwanese woman’s life in the U.S., beginning with graduate studies at Stanford in the 1970s and extending through two marriages and the fulfillment of a long-held dream. Joan’s first marriage, to a fellow student, is disastrous and blessedly brief. She then marries Bill, a wealthy man more than two decades her senior, with whom she has one child and adopts another. Along the way, she awkwardly learns to navigate Bill’s rarified world while raising a family in his famous modernist house in Palo Alto. Throughout the novel, Joan fantasizes about opening a café, the mission of which would be to address the “global deficit in satisfaction” by offering patrons sweet or savory treats along with the chance to meet a willing listener. After her children are grown and Bill dies from natural causes, she opens the Satisfaction Café on the site of a shuttered Chinese video store. Independent and pragmatic, but also secretly soulful, Joan is a character capable of surprising the reader at every turn, especially as she faces the difficulties of growing old. Wang has a light touch, whether in describing events that are heavy or mundane, and avoids sentimentality. This gratifies. Agent: Michelle Brower, Trellis Literary Management. (July)