A Contemporary Novel of Manners

By Katherine Xiong

Weike Wang has made her name as a writer of contemporary “novels of manners,” a genre made famous by Jane Austen two centuries ago. Her books are character studies, featuring close examinations of upper middle class women in white collar jobs and complicated relationships. 

Wang’s latest novel, “Rental House” (released December 3, 2024), is a magic trick of a book that convinces the reader of the high stakes of social conventions while simultaneously exposing how small and absurd they may actually be. 

Readers familiar with Wang’s prior novels, “Chemistry” and “Joan Is Okay,” will find a familiar Wang protagonist in Keru, a successful Chinese-American woman at odds with family and cultural expectations as she approaches middle age. 

“Rental House” adds a partner to Wang’s archetype: Keru’s husband Nate, a first generation college graduate from North Carolina: by all metrics a “real” American, yet just as detached from his family’s reality as Keru. 

Keru and Nate have achieved the American Dream, complete with Yale degrees, an apartment in Manhattan’s Upper West Side, and vacations in Cape Cod and the Catskills. They have a large dog and no children. 

Despite their success, they can’t please anyone – not the two sets of visiting parents, the two couples who arrive as unplanned guests, or themselves. Try as they might, there’s always something slightly “off” when they compare themselves to other couples. 

Add to this the weight of family expectations, social pressure, and the political entanglements of our modern lives—arguments about white/male privilege, the “right” kind of immigrants, or the “race problem”—and disaster ensues.

This is well-trodden territory, and “Rental House” succeeds because of Wang’s richly drawn characters. Each word, gesture, and thought conveys something about a character and how they perceive their place in the world. Much is revealed by details such as Keru and Nate’s interactions with strangers in different contexts and when they choose to speak up or remain silent. 

For example, the Keru who parrots the casual indifference of her upper middle class neighbors by insisting, “no, no, please take the deposit, that’s what it’s there for . . . we’re more than happy to pay,” is the same Keru who, five years earlier, threw rocks at a Karen-type white woman who asked her to leash her dog on a public beach. 

The rock landed a few feet in front of her, kicking up sand. The woman stopped to gawk at the small crater and, a second later, to shriek. The shrieks were discordant and annoying . . . Keru found the second-largest rock and held it in her hand. She looked calmly at the woman until she stopped screaming and looked at Keru in horror. Then the woman took a few steps backward, before turning around to walk away.

As Keru has gotten older, the social expectations of an aging, childless woman have shifted; her relationship with Nate is affected because Keru has been silently grappling with these expectations in ways she could never understand. For his part, Nate develops a sense of inadequacy compared to his wife, the family breadwinner, which manifests as a compulsion to pick fights with his parents and brother and a sense of impending doom.

These conflicts build on one other but, as so often in real life, they are never really settled. Keru and Nate act out the life they believe is expected of them, revealing cognitive dissonances created by intergenerational expectations, unexpressed opinions, and fear of emotional intimacy. 

As Keru says, “cohesive [can mean] less existential, which, I mean, can only be a positive. I wish I were more cohesive.” 

Much narrative weight is given to things like the apologies Keru does or doesn’t make for her dog, or whether either character plays nice with strangers. When delivered in Wang’s impeccable deadpan, these moments can both be hilariously insignificant and reveal deep, painful discord.

Wang holds a PhD in Public Health and embodies the upwardly mobile success story against which Keru and Nate chafe. Like a scientist, she insists on fair trials, delicately balancing Keru and Nate’s respective points of view while observing them like specimens in an experiment. 

This scientific objectivity can be frustrating for readers who are waiting for her to pass judgment of her characters, but this is how “Rental House” completes the magic trick: we share in Keru and Nate’s conflicts so fully that judgement becomes unnecessary.

Weike Wang doesn’t need to tell you what to think of her characters. Instead, she lets them tell on themselves. 

RENTAL HOUSE | Weike Wang | Riverhead Books | 224 pp. | December 3, 2024 | $28

Katherine Xiong is a writer and Buffalo Hive book critic. you can find more information about her and her work here.