Item: Real Americans
Rating: 3
Author: Catherine

Real Americans by Rachel Khong
Published by Knopf
Publication date: April 30, 2024
Genres: Fiction, Literary

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Rachel Khong’s new novel, Real Americans is one family’s story told in four parts spanning from the year 2000 into some time in the near future. The first is set in NYC and introduces a young woman named Lily who falls in love with the heir to a pharmaceutical fortune. Part two takes place 15 years later, is set on a small island off the coast of WA, and is told by their son, Neil. In part three Lily’s mother, May, narrates living through Mao’s Cultural Revolution, her marriage, and how their careers as scientists got them to America. Part four brings this tangled tale of three generations of family to an unexpected conclusion.

I wanted to love this book as Khong’s debut, Goodbye, Vitamin was an intimate, perceptive novel of family and the realities of aging, but where the characters in Goodbye invited connection those in Real Americans did not. Their motivations and actions at several of the novel’s key points were difficult to align. In particular, Lily, who moves from being a young woman who can’t get out of her own way to one who suddenly has the discernment to piece together two slender filaments from the circumstances around her and produce the fully woven truth.

Khong excels at integrating the book’s title and its multiple meanings into various parts of the story. This is particularly timely as the label Real Americans is being thrown around as a very narrow term and a way to exclude many people, but she’s showing the many meanings that can be attributed to those two words. Unfortunately, the story itself feels as if it’s trying to corral a number of sprawling themes, but things lurch and stall with a clunky pace as they move between past, present, and future. Real Americans becomes a Jello mold of genetics, heredity, and the moral and ethical issues posed by new technology, layered with science fiction, and topped by an improbable number of coincidences. If it had gelled it might have worked, but as is the ingredients were muddied and left me uninterested.

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