A reader coming fresh to Tash Aw’s new novel, “The South” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), even one familiar with his four previous, award-winning novels, would profit from a word of explanation. It’s the story of a Malaysian family in the immediate aftermath of the 1997 region-wide financial crisis brought on by massive Thai real estate corruption.
They’re returning, these members of the Lim family, or at any rate some of them, to an old plot of family land south of Kuala Lumpur, the “South” of the somewhat cryptic title, to make some tough determinations about the farm’s economic viability. The chances of that are as slim as these poor people, and the goal of the young ones is to get out of Dodge.
Gradually, over the course of the novel, the reader begins to assemble the pieces of narrative out of what at first seem almost incongruous plot elements. Vagaries as to how things are going at any particular point are easily attributable to the fractured nature of family interactions anywhere.
There are even pointers to the financial shenanigans elsewhere that overnight changed the lives of people throughout Southeast Asia profoundly and for the worse. They woke up to half the money they thought they had when they went to bed.
But if sometimes “The South” is as hard a place for a reader to get grounding as it is for the family on their farm, there is a reason. “The South” is intended as the first novel in a four-part saga. Nothing in the volume you hold in your hand says that, but in this case, what isn’t there is arguably as important as what is.
I read the book without knowing that and frequently wondered why there was such a glut of story, from multiple points of view, such a large revolving cast of characters. Understanding that “The South” is part of a larger literary enterprise makes all the difference. If it’s intermittently baffling, it’s because the author is laying down the series’ expository material.
The elements
Although they do seem to be coming at you fast, these basic materials are as rich as they are numerous. Legitimate and illegitimate brothers have eyes on the property, each for his own reasons. Their wives know them and basically expect very little of them. Their children are, if not focused on the future, hoping against hope that there will be one for them.
The farm itself –mostly an orchard that produces little salable fruit– is being consumed by drought. Everything Aw tells us about the land itself makes it feel tired, worn out, and just plain hard. It’s near a lake that serves as a kind of reverse oasis, a possibly happy place in an otherwise forbidding environment. You no more than glimpse it, and the two boys about to swim in it, then you know that these cousins, Jay and Chuan, sons of the legitimate brother and the illegitimate one, are headed for romance or something resembling it in a culture that would have nothing of it.
Characterizing this novel as the boys’ story, their slowly budding passion, isn’t wrong. That relationship will certainly keep gay readers on board, but it’s helpful to know that theirs is not the only story –the beating heart of this novel, to be sure, but only part of the action. But this is rural Malaysia in hard times, so the chances of a happy ending are significantly curtailed.
The gay elements
Jay, our protagonist, tells most of the story, sometimes but not always in the first-person. Western readers will find him the easiest character to understand. He’s just short of being a gay “type,” a gay guy you might find anywhere in the world.
His memories about childhood sports shame are precious.
“Team sports were the most confusing part of school for me, and football was the activity I dreaded the most. I panicked every time I saw the ball rolling toward me, trying not to recoil in terror, as though it carried with it some kind of contagious disease.”
For many gay readers, this passage will require no further explanation. But Aw works with it, and works it.
One of the book’s most elevated passages –and salient metaphors– is Jay chasing a stray ball at the demand of his teammates, which leads him to another kind of oasis, an open area secluded by tall weeds. There he finds a group of boys being themselves, which is to say playing their own games, some of them sexual. The reader is not surprised when Jay returns to the glen to reconnect with the boys only to find them gone but the space now provisionally his.
What makes the love story both so individual and so typical is that it is only gradual on the part of Chuan.
“There is not enough space on the bed for two of them to lie down on their backs, so they have to stretch out on their sides to avoid touching each other. Why this charade, when all they both want to do is precisely to reach out and touch the body lying next to them? At least Jay was.”
But when Chuan takes an active role in their intimacy, it feels sudden, abrupt, the way it can in real life, despite Jay’s protracted longing. Aw writes their sex credibly but never luridly.
The writing
Even at its most elliptical, the writing is absorbing. But what makes it constantly challenging is its frequent shifts of time frames and points of view. The individual stories are interleaved in a thick tapestry, which can lead to a sense of passing confusion and a desire on the reader’s part to stay with, or promptly get back to, the gay understory.
Aw is especially good at conveying complex stories and intertwining themes in language of startling directness.
“Is this the last time,” Aw writes of the boys’ futures, together and otherwise.
“It is not a question but a pronouncement,” as though Chuan has already made up his mind.
“Is this the last time what?” Jay replies.
“The last time we’ll be alone together. Chuan says this quite calmly, and Jay finds he is hurt by the poise in Chuan’s voice.”
One reasonably hopes that future volumes will bring more, that “The South” is not the last time.
Tash Aw, ‘The South,’ $28, 280 pp., Farrar, Straus and Giroux
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