Gold by the Inch: A Novel - Softcover

Chua, Lawrence

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0802136494 ISBN 13: 9780802136497

Publisher: Grove Press, 1999

Synopsis

Called "striking" by The New York Times Book Review, Gold by the Inch is the story of a young New Yorker of Asian descent who has returned to the country of his birth following a disastrous relationship and his father's death. In a Bangkok drunk on the nation's financial miracle - and high on an assortment of other things - the narrator meets Thong, a young, beautiful male hustler who works at a nightclub. As his romantic obsession with Thong grows, the narrator tries to convince himself that it transcends its commercial nature, but he is quickly forced into a hard look at the connections between desire and exploitation, personal and national identity. Lawrence Chua vividly combines Southeast Asia's troubled history with evocations of its modern face - its polyglot culture, its colonial past, the cool futurism of its skyscrapers and its sex industry. Written in hard-bitten, dazzling prose, Gold by the Inch is a stunning debut.

About this title

Review

Lawrence Chua has long been praised for his astute cultural commentary and experimental prose. In his first novel, Gold by the Inch, he also proves himself as a vibrant and breathtaking writer of literary prose. The narrative follows a young gay man of Asian descent as he returns to Thailand from the United States for an extended visit and to recover from his father's death and a failed love affair. After becoming involved, well, obsessed, with a young male prostitute, the narrator has to confront issues he has long avoided: national identity, the exploitation of other people, and the endless clashes between Asian and Western cultures. Like the novels of Doris Lessing and Nadine Gordimer, Gold by the Inch attempts to wed the personal with the political, the emotional with the cultural. It is as much a novel of political ideas as it is a meditation on romantic and sexual relationships. Chua's prose is boldly literary and often shocking in its simplicity; he knows the power of words and has the ability to conjure up images that surprise and resonate.

From Kirkus Reviews

Imagery suggesting the-urban-jungle-is-hell-nor-are-we-out-of- it threatens to suffocate a frenetic first novel about an Asian- born architect's return from America to his native Thailand. The unnamed narrator is 23, gay, and intermittently guilty for having willfully separated from his family (with whom he had emigrated to America) and bitter about his country's transformation into a glitter palace buoyed by a booming economy and riddled with drugs, booze, and beautiful people whose bodies are for hire. Chua's fragmented narrative juxtaposes these concerns against his protagonist's awareness of his own moral deterioration, which takes the form of his infatuation with a gorgeous but somewhat distracted male prostitute, Thon (he of the ``face that inspires a thousand plane tickets, a million visa bribes''). A number of the story's particulars are indeed compelling: for example, the history of violent behavior that has threaded its way through the narrator's family, climaxing with his scapegrace father's dementia and death, and the mysterious unexplained demise of his grandmother, who may have been murdered (though this later information rather too nakedly emblemizes a distorted ethnic heritage). There's also a potentially fascinating subtheme implied by the narrator's intuition that the body expresses the spirit of its desires exactly as architecture expresses that of a city--but the concept is left in an essentially inchoate state. The novel is further burdened with barely fictionalized jeremiads condemning injustices perpetrated by colonialist exploitation (``The British Empire at the beginning of the nineteenth century was essentially a drug cartel''). The idea of an architect who can't impose order on his experiences and emotions is a promising one, and the narrator's pain and outrage seem real enough--but Chua's first fiction flies in too many directions at once to engage the reader's interest fully. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Edition details

• Publisher: Grove Press
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0802136494
• ISBN 13: 9780802136497
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 224