A Taiwanese American doctoral student uncovers an academic conspiracy of epic proportions against a backdrop of campus unrest in Elaine Hsieh Chou's gleefully dark and incisive first novel, Disorientation.
Ingrid Yang, a student at the "firmly middling institution" Barnes University, wanted to become a professor of modernist literature. She never intended to write her dissertation on Xiao-Wen Chou, the "so-called Chinese Robert Frost" and former Barnes professor, the college's single claim to fame. Her academic adviser Michael Bartholomew, a white professor of East Asian Studies, cajoled her into the topic with the lure of a tenured professorship named after the famous poet. Now 29, with student loan debt rising, and secretly hoping she'll develop ulcers so she can fail her dissertation blamelessly, Ingrid has made almost no progress. She can't find a fresh angle on the widely researched poet.
During another desperate research session, she finds a mysterious, insulting correction on a page of her notes, signed with a fake name. Ingrid becomes obsessed with finding the writer, first hiring a PI and then playing sleuth herself. The truth she uncovers will shake Barnes to its foundation.
Though mainly a traditional third-person narrative, the story occasionally veers into a multiformat approach evocative of Charles Yu's Interior Chinatown, including a dream sequence told through a courtroom transcript in which secondary characters try Ingrid for dating only white men. Chou's examination of the catch-22s faced by Asian Americans, particularly women, straddles the line between satiric and searing. Disorientation is the best combination of entertaining and thought-provoking, and Chou is an exciting new voice in fiction. --Jaclyn Fulwood, blogger at Infinite Reads