Customer Reviews

Gold by the Inch

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

One thing that Chua does exceedingly well is stylizing. Nevermind the story (if it were a bit more connected, I'd give him 5 stars). He is brassy, he is vulnerable. He is vulgar, he is tender. This is the sort of book that requires much of its readers. Those who take it at face value will hate it (as some of the reviewers above have). The narrator may not be likeable, but then again there is a reason why the author made him that way. Those who prefer to be spoonfed should turn to Stephen King or Higgins or Danielle Steel.

I like this book because it has guts. It'll make you wince and gag and chew your lips to shred. Chua has the power of a very keen poet. Highly recommended to writers or those with a deep appreciation for prose.

The colonizer here is a Malaysian-born New Yorker pursuing the inscrutable orientalized (Thai) hustler and taking out some of his aggressions on a European (Danish) tourist. Of course, the unnamed narrator considers himself a victim--not how most Malaysians regard families like his.

I was recommended this book by a professor of mine, who told me earnestly I would like it. At first I was leery: a book about a young man returning to a colonized world to find himself and falling in an obsessive love with a male prostitute? A book about south east asia, capital, cultural differences? I am Asian American, but not SE Asian American. I knew I would not understand the linguistic and cultural references in it right off the bat.

Yet I have found myself haunted by Gold By the Inch. The narrator's return, his physical similarity with the long-time native residents jarring with his linguistic failures, was the first to resonate with me, as another immigrant to the United States who has gradually lost a mother tongue.

The obliterating blind love the narrator has for the male prostitute Thong may not have been reasonable or even fair to the young Thai man. There is a constant tectonic shift between the deep longing emerging the colonized side of the narrator's voice and the inevitably commanding, essentializing gaze of the narrator. The narrator, like the story, is taut with contradiction. He strides along a shifting border: one moment he is victim, another he is abuser. One moment he thinks purely Western stereotype, and another he pauses with love and irony over colonial history, a history which, like the stories surrounding his long-dead grandmother, emphasize the way humans are treated as objects in order to produce things: things like buildings, things like babies, things like empire.

The brutal love (sex?) scenes were erotic intellectually, but not physically. The story is not clear. Plots meander. Chua revels in the words, almost cajoling affect from them. But to summarize this novel in a few words, as if it were some black and white thing meant to reproduce an accurate portrayal of anybody, doesn't do this novel justice. It is clearly not meant for light reading. Nonetheless its deep ambivalence (perhaps even a narrative impotence in the face of capitalism) and its deliberate language has left me reading and rereading sentences to prolong a certain shiver. I recognize his sentiments, in relationships, in elevating the body, in wandering.

I think the NYT Book Review summarized it best... "too diffused and stylized to provide a deeper reflection." It's a pity that the writer succumbed to stylizing his prose because he has a keen eye for observation which is unfortunately lost in trying to be too cute.

Chua's novel has garnared mixed critical reception in large part because he succeeds so boldly in inventing a new literary language. The novel's experience hinges on the interplay between it's artfully wrought chapters, the space between words as important as the words themselves. Like Toni Morrison did with Beloved, Chua not only challenges the legitimacy of master narratives, his stylistic choices also find a way to write past them. A challenging and unsettling read that remains fully engaging. Chua is a writer to watch closely.

An extraordinary and compelling novel, especially in its bold and simple language, its force; GOLD BY THE INCH is one of the two best books I've read this year, along with Colm Toibin's THE STORY OF THE NIGHT!

"Its those vines. They always bring you back to the forest" (59). This book is the wine turned blood, fantasy made real in flesh. Vulgar. Hard. My ever-shifting diasporan world contextualized through Lawrence's haunting precision of an eye: Plaridel, Nueva York, Daly City, Maui. Violent Empowerment. Colonial Violence. History's infinite expanse recycled into stolen tongues, brownlands, coca leaves. Queens, prostitues and manlovers are humanized. Borderless maps drawn with history's desires. Lawrence constructs a blueprint for my kind's existence by narrating our real encounters. He is an architect of souls. I too am in love with his badboy, Thong. Thong can devour my dreams anytime. Lawrence is my twin. The only difference is he writes in pages, i live in them. The language of the book has got this beat. It brings me back to the ghetto lifestyle, WUTANG slicing their tracks and Nas verse-writing. Utang means debt where am from. Props. My newyorkcity summer feels like home as I pull the book away from my face. Browner!

I recently read Lawrence Chua's rendering of a young man's experience of returning to Thailand to confront himself. I was on vacation in Bangkok/Pattaya at the time and the images he drew were all too real for me. Unfortunately the spell was broken from time to time when Lawrence seemed to go a little too deep or symbolic. It seemed as though he was writing for himself and not the reader. I felt that I needed a little more clarity before he went spinning off into all of the little word-game images.

The parts that were "right on" were the narrative and the description of the environment, whether it was the inside of a toilet, the coast line, or a hotel room. I felt the abandoned feeling from the drugs and the not-belonging of the protagonist. I felt him searching and trying to connect as I have done, although in a much different way. I could not ignore my own desperation when reading Gold by the Inch. Lawrence esposed several different relationships and kept a relentless pressure in regards to confronting oneself. The culmination of which, for me, was how to determine the value of ourself and other people and then extract every ounce of it before discarding the human being.

Lawrence Chua has written a very believable novel and I am anxious to order another and see if he can raise the same feelings and discover the same hiding places he found with Gold by the Inch. And, by the way, what a great title.