A review by storytimed
The Collective by Don Lee
3.0
I think this book lives and dies on its distance from the narrator. Eric is a total Nice Guy, and The Collective is worse when it feels like it's a book from him and better when it feels like it's a book about him. Halfway through the novel, nestled in his poor-little-me Gen Xer perspective, I hated it. As I finished reading, having seen him grow the fuck up a little and called out by Jessica, I thought to myself: maybe I actually liked reading this after all.
The prose is v. readable and good at capturing the little pinprick gradations of human discontent. The long scene where the 3AC try to come up with a mission statement is 100% true to life. Esther's success despite Eric's little bitch baby resentment of her was pretty delicious. There's a tenderness that Eric has for Josh, this difficult awful man, that almost makes me like their relationship, despite Joshua being an absolute trashbag of a human being. I very much liked how Eric is just, at his core, not a very good writer and uncomfortably aware of it.
OTOH, sometimes The Collective dips into typical male-protagonist self-inserty narcissism. Jessica Tsai is often the voice of reason and I liked that she ended up with another woman after all, but some of her scenes get way too indulgently Chasing Amy about her presumed sexual access for Eric. Nobody brings up intersectionality, which may have just been how it was in the 2000s (probably not? this is post-Margaret Cho!), but that definitely narrows the perspective of a novel whose main protagonist spends twenty years incredibly aggrieved about race. Noklek is a total nonentity & stereotype - makes me want to write something about how Asian-Americans Other Asians from Asia.
Also: despite the focus on race, somehow The Collective is not at all in conversation with Asian American culture at large. Eric's third-gen SoCal heritage is meant to make him a sort of blank slate who's never had to think about his culture in his life, but that's completely not accurate to the vibrant Asian-American identity in SoCal, and it just makes him a generic everydude. He and Joshua only vaguely interact with Asian-ness on the "complaining about stereotype" level. The sum total of literary references is a running joke about Murakami, even though they live in a time period that's post-Maxine Hong Kingston and contemporary to Amy Tan. I mean, that totally tracks with the portrayal of Eric and Joshua as pretentious dilettantes, but it still kind of pisses me off.
This book could have been so much more interesting with some distance. I wanted more than an one-off observation from Jessica to tease out the mutual expectations and toxicity and idealization between Joshua and Eric. I wanted a bit more of the other 3AC members, or an idea of how this collective fits into the larger Asian-American media landscape. I wanted Noklek to be treated like a fucking person instead of the underage Southeast Asian refugee/prostitute stereotype (fuck, that's noxious). I wanted a book that was really about a collective, not just its least interesting member.
The prose is v. readable and good at capturing the little pinprick gradations of human discontent. The long scene where the 3AC try to come up with a mission statement is 100% true to life. Esther's success despite Eric's little bitch baby resentment of her was pretty delicious. There's a tenderness that Eric has for Josh, this difficult awful man, that almost makes me like their relationship, despite Joshua being an absolute trashbag of a human being. I very much liked how Eric is just, at his core, not a very good writer and uncomfortably aware of it.
OTOH, sometimes The Collective dips into typical male-protagonist self-inserty narcissism. Jessica Tsai is often the voice of reason and I liked that she ended up with another woman after all, but some of her scenes get way too indulgently Chasing Amy about her presumed sexual access for Eric. Nobody brings up intersectionality, which may have just been how it was in the 2000s (probably not? this is post-Margaret Cho!), but that definitely narrows the perspective of a novel whose main protagonist spends twenty years incredibly aggrieved about race. Noklek is a total nonentity & stereotype - makes me want to write something about how Asian-Americans Other Asians from Asia.
Also: despite the focus on race, somehow The Collective is not at all in conversation with Asian American culture at large. Eric's third-gen SoCal heritage is meant to make him a sort of blank slate who's never had to think about his culture in his life, but that's completely not accurate to the vibrant Asian-American identity in SoCal, and it just makes him a generic everydude. He and Joshua only vaguely interact with Asian-ness on the "complaining about stereotype" level. The sum total of literary references is a running joke about Murakami, even though they live in a time period that's post-Maxine Hong Kingston and contemporary to Amy Tan. I mean, that totally tracks with the portrayal of Eric and Joshua as pretentious dilettantes, but it still kind of pisses me off.
This book could have been so much more interesting with some distance. I wanted more than an one-off observation from Jessica to tease out the mutual expectations and toxicity and idealization between Joshua and Eric. I wanted a bit more of the other 3AC members, or an idea of how this collective fits into the larger Asian-American media landscape. I wanted Noklek to be treated like a fucking person instead of the underage Southeast Asian refugee/prostitute stereotype (fuck, that's noxious). I wanted a book that was really about a collective, not just its least interesting member.