A Review of Alexandra Chang’s Days of Distraction
Posted by:
![[personal profile]](https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/hostedimages/1491408111i/22407843.png)
jacobballew
In this review, I cover Alexandra Chang’s debut Days of Distraction (Ecco, 2020). Let’s let the official description do some work for us: “A wry, tender portrait of a young woman—finally free to decide her own path, but unsure if she knows herself well enough to choose wisely—from a captivating new literary voice. The plan is to leave. As for how, when, to where, and even why—she doesn’t know yet. So begins a journey for the twenty-four-year-old narrator of Days of Distraction. As a staff writer at a prestigious tech publication, she reports on the achievements of smug Silicon Valley billionaires and start-up bros while her own request for a raise gets bumped from manager to manager. And when her longtime boyfriend, J, decides to move to a quiet upstate New York town for grad school, she sees an excuse to cut and run. Moving is supposed to be a grand gesture of her commitment to J and a way to reshape her sense of self. But in the process, she finds herself facing misgivings about her role in an interracial relationship. Captivated by the stories of her ancestors and other Asian Americans in history, she must confront a question at the core of her identity: What does it mean to exist in a society that does not notice or understand you? Equal parts tender and humorous, and told in spare but powerful prose, Days of Distraction is an offbeat coming-of-adulthood tale, a touching family story, and a razor-sharp appraisal of our times.” The thing to note right away from this description is that the narrator is not given a name, so I’m going to provide you with a spoiler warning right away: look away if you don’t want to know. Our narrator is none other than a character named Alexandra (which isn’t revealed until third quarters of the way into the novel). If you do some cursory research, you also find out that the author, Alexandra Chang once worked as a journalist in the tech industry in the Bay Area. So, we’re obviously working within the frame of the autobiographical novel. I always find these types of texts interesting because you can’t help but wonder what has been fictionalized and what has not. In any case, the novel is structured basically in vignettes. The first quarter or so focuses on Alexandra’s life in the Bay Area and the complicated and often unfulfilling work that she is engaging in. Her boyfriend’s graduate school admission proves to give her a reboot, but things start to change when they move to Ithaca, New York. What Chang’s novel does best is to provide readers how an individual comes into race consciousness. For someone like our narrator, who is used to parsing out lots of information and digesting it, her interests lead her to explore Asian American history, especially with respect to interracial relationships and early figurations of Asian American women. These forays lead her to wonder about her own relationship with J, which eventually leads to a rupture point. Alexandra is then led to visit her father (who has long been separated from Alexandra’s mother), who lives in China. The time she has with her father seems to give her the perspective to return to her relationship with a new sense of purpose and possibility. Yet, I was skeptical. I found this narrator quite introspective in a way that J did not seem to be. The rapprochement that the narrative offers up between J and Alexandra seems to be one that may not be lasting, or at least I thought so. Nevertheless, Chang gives us some sublime prose and an absolutely crystal-clear view into the process by which one comes to terms with their own sense of racial and gendered social difference. A writer to watch.
comments
jacobballew
In this review, I cover Alexandra Chang’s debut Days of Distraction (Ecco, 2020). Let’s let the official description do some work for us: “A wry, tender portrait of a young woman—finally free to decide her own path, but unsure if she knows herself well enough to choose wisely—from a captivating new literary voice. The plan is to leave. As for how, when, to where, and even why—she doesn’t know yet. So begins a journey for the twenty-four-year-old narrator of Days of Distraction. As a staff writer at a prestigious tech publication, she reports on the achievements of smug Silicon Valley billionaires and start-up bros while her own request for a raise gets bumped from manager to manager. And when her longtime boyfriend, J, decides to move to a quiet upstate New York town for grad school, she sees an excuse to cut and run. Moving is supposed to be a grand gesture of her commitment to J and a way to reshape her sense of self. But in the process, she finds herself facing misgivings about her role in an interracial relationship. Captivated by the stories of her ancestors and other Asian Americans in history, she must confront a question at the core of her identity: What does it mean to exist in a society that does not notice or understand you? Equal parts tender and humorous, and told in spare but powerful prose, Days of Distraction is an offbeat coming-of-adulthood tale, a touching family story, and a razor-sharp appraisal of our times.” The thing to note right away from this description is that the narrator is not given a name, so I’m going to provide you with a spoiler warning right away: look away if you don’t want to know. Our narrator is none other than a character named Alexandra (which isn’t revealed until third quarters of the way into the novel). If you do some cursory research, you also find out that the author, Alexandra Chang once worked as a journalist in the tech industry in the Bay Area. So, we’re obviously working within the frame of the autobiographical novel. I always find these types of texts interesting because you can’t help but wonder what has been fictionalized and what has not. In any case, the novel is structured basically in vignettes. The first quarter or so focuses on Alexandra’s life in the Bay Area and the complicated and often unfulfilling work that she is engaging in. Her boyfriend’s graduate school admission proves to give her a reboot, but things start to change when they move to Ithaca, New York. What Chang’s novel does best is to provide readers how an individual comes into race consciousness. For someone like our narrator, who is used to parsing out lots of information and digesting it, her interests lead her to explore Asian American history, especially with respect to interracial relationships and early figurations of Asian American women. These forays lead her to wonder about her own relationship with J, which eventually leads to a rupture point. Alexandra is then led to visit her father (who has long been separated from Alexandra’s mother), who lives in China. The time she has with her father seems to give her the perspective to return to her relationship with a new sense of purpose and possibility. Yet, I was skeptical. I found this narrator quite introspective in a way that J did not seem to be. The rapprochement that the narrative offers up between J and Alexandra seems to be one that may not be lasting, or at least I thought so. Nevertheless, Chang gives us some sublime prose and an absolutely crystal-clear view into the process by which one comes to terms with their own sense of racial and gendered social difference. A writer to watch.
Buy the Book Here:
https://www.harpercollins.com/9780062951809/days-of-distraction/
comments
No comments have been added yet.
